Cecilia Alm Headshot

Cecilia Alm

Professor

Department of Psychology
College of Liberal Arts
Artificial Intelligence Program Director

585-475-7327
Office Hours
Tuesday, Thursday
Office Location
Office Mailing Address
92 Lomb Memorial Drive Rochester, NY 14623 Office: Eastman 3242

Cecilia Alm

Professor

Department of Psychology
College of Liberal Arts
Artificial Intelligence Program Director

Education

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Bio

Cecilia (Cissi) O. Alm is the joint program director of the MS in AI in the School of Information, the director of the AWARE-AI NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program at RIT, and also director of CLaSP, the Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing Lab. She is Professor in the Department of Psychology (EAS-3242) and affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, the Ph.D. Program in Computing and Information Sciences, and the MS in Data Science. She is also Associate Director of the Center for Human-aware AI at RIT. Her research interests are in AI and machine learning for affective computing with linguistic or multimodal sensing, multimodal dialogue processing, or humans in NLP and AI systems including for interactive machine learning. Cissi has taught natural language processing, speech processing, artificial intelligence, and linguistics courses. Also see her lab (https://www.rit.edu/clasp/) and distribution page (https://people.rc.rit.edu/~coagla). 
 
Office hours: Thursday 10-11 am in GOL-2303.

585-475-7327

Areas of Expertise

Select Scholarship

Published Conference Proceedings
Kothari, Ammina, et al. "News consumption helps readers identify model-generated news." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE Western New York Image and Signal Processing Workshop. Ed. N.A. Rochester, NY, USA: IEEE, 2023. Print.
Amin, Akhter Al, et al. "Modeling word importance in conversational transcripts: Toward improved live captioning for deaf and hard of hearing viewers." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference. Ed. N. A. Austin, Texas: ACM, 2023. Web.
Dust, A'di, et al. "Understanding differences in human-robot teaming dynamics between deaf/hard of hearing and hearing individuals." Proceedings of the Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Ed. Ginevra Castellano, et al. Stockholm, Sweden: ACM, 2023. Web.
Arthur, Isabelle, et al. "MDE – Multimodal data explorer for flexible visualization of multiple data streams." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Conference: Late Breaking Results. Ed. N. A. Cambridge, MA, USA: IEEE, 2023. Web.
Baheri, Ali and Cecilia O. Alm. "LLMs-augmented contextual bandit." Proceedings of the FMDM Workshop (at NeurIPS 2023). Ed. Sherry Yang et al. N. p., USA: NeurIPS, 2023. Web.
Ashwath, Anisha, et al. "Early vs. late multimodal fusion for recognizing confusion in collaborative tasks." Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW). Ed. N. A. Cambridge, MA, USA: IEEE, 2023. Web.
Alm, Cecilia O. and Alex Hedges. "Visualizing NLP in Undergraduate Students’ Learning about Natural Language." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EAAI). Ed. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Virtual, Virtual: AAAI Press, 2021. Web.
Hassan, Saad, Matt Huenerfauth, and Cecilia O. Alm. "Unpacking the Interdependent Systems of Discrimination: Ableist Bias in NLP Systems through an Intersectional Lens." Proceedings of the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021. Ed. Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, and Scott Wen-tau Yih. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021. Web.
Kaushik, Nikhil, et al. "Eliciting Confusion in Online Conversational Tasks." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (at ACII 2021). Ed. NA. Nara, Japan (Online): IEEE, 2021. Web.
Akhbardeh, Farhad, et al. "Handling Extreme Class Imbalance in Technical Logbook Datasets." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Long Papers). Ed. Chengqing Zong, et al. Online, Online: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021. Web.
Maus, Natalie, et al. "Gaze-guided magnification for individuals with vision impairments." Proceedings of the Proceedings of Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Ed. CHI (Late Breaking Works). Honolulu, HI, USA: ACM, 2020. Web.
Forman, Cleo, et al. "Capturing laughter and smiles under genuine amusement vs. negative emotion." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Human-Centered Computational Sensing (at PerCom 2020). Ed. Amy L. Murphy and Edison Thomaz. Austin, TX, USA [Virtual]: IEEE, 2020. Web.
Kvist, Jonathan, et al. "Dynamic visualization system for gaze and dialogue data." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Human Computer Interaction Theory and Applications HUCAPP 2020. Ed. Manuela Chessa, Alexis Paljic, Jose Braz. Valetta, Malta: SciTePress, 2020. Web.
Bohlin, Gustaf, et al. "Considerations for Face-based Data Estimates: Affect Reactions to Videos." Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Human Computer Interaction Theory and Applications. Ed. Manuela Chessa, Alexis Paljic, and Jose Braz. Prague, Czech Republic: SCITEPRESS, 2019. Web.
Kafle, Sushant, Cecilia O. Alm, and Matt Huenerfauth. "Modeling Acoustic-prosodic Cues for Word Importance Prediction in Spoken Dialogues." Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies, SLPAT 2019 (at NAACL 2019). Ed. Manuela Chessa, Alexis Paljic, and Jose Braz. Minnesota, MS: ACL, 2019. Web.
Kessler, Lucas, Cecilia O. Alm, and Reynold Bailey. "Synthesized Spoken Names: Biases Impacting Perception." Proceedings of the Interspeech (Show and Tell). Ed. Pejman Mowlaee, Mario Huemer, and Philipp Salletmayr. Graz, Austria: n.p., 2019. Web.
Kafle, Sushant, Cecilia O. Alm, and Matt Huenerfauth. "Fusion Strategy for Prosodic and Lexical Representations of Word Importance." Proceedings of the Interspeech. Ed. Thomas Hain and Björn Schuller. Graz, Austria: ISCA, 2019. Web.
Saraf, Monali, et al. "Multimodal Anticipated Versus Actual Perceptual Reactions." Proceedings of the ICMI19: Adjunct of the 21st ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Suzhou, China). Ed. Wen Gao, et al. Suzhou, China: ACM, 2019. Web.
Wang, Regina, et al. "Fusing Dialogue and Gaze from Discussions of 2D and 3D Scenes." Proceedings of the ICM19: Adjunct of the 21st ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction. Ed. Wen Gao, et al. Suzhou, China: ACM, 2019. Web.
Lucas, Elizabeth, Cecilia O. Alm, and Reynold Bailey. "Understanding Human and Predictive Moderation of Online Science Discourse." Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE Western New York Image and Signal Processing Workshop (WNYISPW). Ed. Raymond Ptucha. Rochester, New York: IEEE, 2019. Web.
Haduong, Nikita, et al. "Multimodal Alignment for Affective Content." Proceedings of the Workshop of Affective Content Analysis (at AAAI 2018). Ed. Niyati Chhaya, Kokil Jaidka, and Lyle H. Ungar. New Orleans, North America: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2018. Web.
Medina, Rebecca, et al. "Sensing Behaviors of Students in Online vs. Face-to-face Lecturing Contexts." Proceedings of the Workshop on Homan-Centered Computational Sensing (at PerCom 2018). Ed. Cecilia O. Alm, Reynold Bailey, and Ehsan Hoque. Athens, Greece: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, 2018. Web.
Diaz, Yancarlos, et al. "Towards an Affective Video Recommendation System." Proceedings of the Workshop on Homan-Centered Computational Sensing (at PerCom 2018). Ed. Cecilia O. Alm, Reynold Bailey, and Ehsan Hoque. Athens, Greece: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, 2018. Web.
Tornblad, McKenna K., et al. "Sensing and Learning Human Annotators Engaged in Narrative Sensemaking." Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop (at NAACL 2018). Ed. Silvio Ricardo Cordeiro, Shereen Oraby, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, and Kyeongmin Rim. New Orleans, Louisiana: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018. Web.
Meyers, Benjamin S, et al. "A Dataset for Identifying Actionable Feedback in Collaborative Software Development." Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers). Ed. Iryna Gurevych and Yusuke Miyao. Melbourne, Australia: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018. Web.
Vaidyanathan, Preethi, et al. "SNAG: Spoken Narratives and Gaze Dataset." Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers). Ed. Iryna Gurevych and Yusuke Miyao. Melbourne, Australia: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018. Web.
Shea, Jordan E., Cecilia O. Alm, and Reynold Bailey. "Contemporary Multimodal Data Collection Methodology for Reliable Inference of Authentic Surprise." Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Western New York Image and Signal Processing Workshop (WNYISPW). Ed. Ray Ptucha. Rochester, New York: IEEE, 2018. Web.
Gangji, Aliya, Trevor Walden, Preethi Vaidyanathan, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Reynold Bailey, and Cecilia O. Alm. "Using co-captured face, gaze and verbal reactions to images of varying emotional content for analysis and semantic alignment." Proceedings of the Workshop on Human-Aware Artificial Intelligence (at AAAI 2017). Ed. Kartik Talamadupula, et al. San Francisco, CA: AAAI, 2017. Web.
Edwards, Ashley, Anthony Massicci, Srinivas Sridharan, Joe Geigel, Linwei Wang, Reynold Bailey, and Cecilia O. Alm. "Sensor-based methodological observations for studying online learning." Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Intelligent Interfaces for Ubiquitous and Smart Learning (at IUI 2017). Ed. Ilknur Celik and Ilaria Torre. Limassol, Cyprus, Cyprus: ACM, 2017. Web.
Calderwood, Alexander, Elizabeth A. Pruett, Raymond Ptucha, Christopher M. Homan, Cecilia O. Alm. "Understanding the semantics of narratives of interpersonal violence through reader annotations and physiological reactions." Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Semantics beyond Events and Roles (at EACL 2017). Ed. Eduardo Blanco, Roser Morante, and Roser Saurí­. Valencia, Spain: ACL, 2017. Web.
Munaiah, Nuthan, Benjamin S. Meyers, Cecilia O. Alm, Andrew Meneely, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah. Emily Prud'hommeaux, Josephine Wolff, and Yang Yu. "Natural language insights from code reviews that missed a vulnerability: A large scale study of Chromium." Proceedings of the International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems. Ed. Eric Bodden, Mathias Payer, Elias Athanasopoulos. Bonn, Germany: n.p., 2017. Web.
Alm, Cecilia O., Benjamin S. Meyers, and Emily Prud’hommeaux. "An analysis and visualization tool for case study learning of linguistics concepts." Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Demo papers). Ed. Lucia Specia, Matt Post, Michael Paul. Copenhagen, Denmark: ACL, 2017. Web.
Alm, Cecilia O. and Reynold Bailey. "Team-based, transdisciplinary, and inclusive practices for undergraduate research." Proceedings of the IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. Ed. n.p. Indianapolis, IN: IEEE, 2017. Web.
Terkik, Andamlak, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Cecilia O. Alm, Christopher Homan, Scott Franklin,. "Analyzing Gender Bias in Student Evaluations." Proceedings of the COLING, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers. Ed. Nicoletta Calzolari et al. Osaka, Japan: n.p., 2016. Web.
Liu, Tong, Christopher Homan, Cecilia O. Alm, Megan Lytle, Ann Marie White, Henry Kautz,. "Understanding Discourse on Work and Job-related Well-being in Public Social Media." Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Ed. Antal van den Bosch et al. Berlin, Germany: n.p., 2016. Web.
Bullard, Joseph, Cecilia O. Alm, Xumin Liu, Ruben A. Proano, Qi Yu, . "Towards Early Dementia Detection: Fusing Linguistic and Non-linguistic Clinical Data." Proceedings of the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality (at NAACL 2016). Ed. Kristy Hollingshead and Lyle Ungar. San Diego, USA: n.p., 2016. Web.
Oak, Mayuresh, Anil K. Behera, Titus Thomas, Cecilia O. Alm, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Christopher M. Homan, Ray Ptucha,. "Generating Clinically Relevant Texts: A Case Study on Life-changing Events." Proceedings of the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality (at NAACL-HLT 2016). Ed. Kristy Hollingshead and Lyle Ungar. San Diego, California: n.p., 2016. Web.
Vaidyanathan, Preethi, Jeff B. Pelz, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Cecilia O. Alm, Anne R. Haake,. "Fusing Eye Movements and Observer Narratives for Expert-driven Image-region Annotations." Proceedings of the ETRA. Ed. Pernilla Qvarfordt and Dan Witzner Hansen. Charleston, SC: n.p., 2016. Web.
Schrading, Nicholas, et al. "An Analysis of Domestic Abuse Discourse on Reddit." Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2577-2583. Ed. Lluís Màrquez, Chris Callison-Burch, Jian Su. Lisbon, Portugal: ACL, 2015. Web.
Vaidyanathan,, Preethi, et al. "Computational Integration of Human Vision and Natural Language Through Bitext Alignment." Proceedings of the Workshop on Vision and Language at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4-5. Ed. --. Lisbon, Portugal: ACL, 2015. Web.
Schrading, Nicholas, et al. "#WhyIStayed, #WhyILeft: Microblogging to Make Sense of Domestic Abuse." Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics-Human Language Technologies, pages 1281-1286. Ed. --. Denver, CO: ACL, 2015. Web.
Bethamcherla, Vasudev, et al. "Face-speech Sensor Fusion for Non-invasive Stress Detection." Proceedings of the 1st Joint Conference on Facial Analysis, Animation, and Auditory-Visual Speech Processing, pages 196-201. Ed. --. Vienna, Austria: ISCA, 2015. Web.
Paul, Will, et al. "Stressed out: What Speech Tells us About Stress." Proceedings of the Interspeech 2015, pages 3710-3714. Ed. --. Dresden, Germany: ISCA, 2015. Web.
Vaidyanathan, Preethi, et al. "Alignment of Eye Movements and Spoken Language for Semantic Image Understanding." Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Semantics, pages 76-81. Ed. --. London, UK: ACL, 2015. Web.
Bullard, Joseph, et al. "Inference from Structured and Unstructured Electronic Medical Data for Dementia Detection." Proceedings of the Operation Research and Computing: Algorithms and Software for Analytics, 14th INFORMS Computing Society Conference (ICS2015), pages 236—244. Ed. --. Richmond, VA: n.p., 2015. Web.
Guo, Xuan, et al. "Fusing Multimodal Human Expert Data Towards Semantic Image Use." Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction: Eye-Gaze & Multimodality. Ed. Nb. Istanbul, Turkey: ACM, 2014. Web.
Hochberg, Limor, et al. "Towards Automatic Annotation of Clinical Decision-making Style." Proceedings of the LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop at COLING 2014. Ed. Lori Levin, Manfred Stede. Dublin, Ireland: n.p., 2014. Web.
Bullard, Joseph, et al. "Towards Multimodal Modeling of Physicians Diagnostic Confidence and Self-awareness Using Medical Narratives." Proceedings of the COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers. Ed. Junichi Tsujii and Jan Hajic. Dublin, Ireland: Dublin City University and Association for Computational Linguistics, 2014. Web.
Moseley, Nathaniel, Cecilia O. Alm, and Manjeet Rege. "Toward Inferring the Age of Twitter Users From Their Use of Nonstandard Abbreviations and Lexicon." Proceedings of the IEEE IRI 2014. Ed. Elisa Bertino, Bhavani Thuraisingham, Ling Liu, James Joshi. San Francisco,, California: IEEE, 2014. Web.
Hochberg, Limor, Cecilia O. Alm, Esa M. Rantanen, Caroline M. DeLong, and Anne R. Haake. "Decision Style in a Clinical Reasoning Corpus." Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP 2014),. Ed. Kevin Bretonnel Cohen et al. Baltimore, Maryland: ACL, Web.
Christopher, Homan, et al. "Toward Macro-Insights for Suicide Prevention: Analyzing Fine-Grained Distress at Scale." Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Ed. Resnik, P., Resnik, R., Mitchell, M. Baltimore, Maryland: n.p., Web.
Moseley, Nathaniel, Cecilia O. Alm, and Manjeet Rege. "User-annotated Microtext Data for Modeling and Analyzing Sociolinguistic Characteristics and Age Grading." Proceedings of the IEEE Eighth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science. Ed. Rebecca Deneckere, Marko Bajec, Martine Collard. Marrakesh, Morocco: IEEE, Web.
Guo, Xuan, et al. "Infusing Perceptual Expertise and Domain Knowledge into a Human-centered Image Retrieval System: A Prototype Application." Proceedings of the ETRA 2014. Ed. Nb. Safety Harbor,, Florida: ACM, Web.
Vaidyanathan, Preethi, et al. "Recurrence Quantification Analysis Reveals Differences in Eye-movement Behavior Between Expert and Novice Dermatologists." Proceedings of the ETRA 2014. Ed. Unknown. Safety Harbor, Florida: n.p., 2014. Web.
Womack, K., et al. "Markers of Confidence and Correctness in Spoken Medical Narratives." Proceedings of the Interspeech 2013. Ed. ISCA. Lyon, France: n.p., 2013. Web.
Womack, Kathryn, et al. "Using Linguistic Analysis to Characterize Conceptual Units of Thought in Spoken Medical Narratives." Proceedings of the Interspeech 2013. Ed. ISCA. Lyon, France: n.p., 2013. Web.
Womack, Kathryn, et al. "Disfluencies as Extra-Propositional Indicators of Cognitive Processing." Proceedings of the Ex-Prom-2012: Workshop on Extra-Propositional Aspect of Meaning in Computational Linguistics at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2012. Ed. Roser Morante and Caroline Sporleder. Jeju, Korea: n.p., 2013. Web.
McCoy, Wilson. "Annotation Schemes to Encode Domain Knowledge in Medical Narratives." Proceedings of the 6th Linguistic Annotation Workshop at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Associate. for Computational Linguistics 2012. Ed. Nancy Ide and Fei Xia. Jeju, Korea: n.p., 2012. Web.
McCoy, Wilson, et al. "Linking Uncertainty in Physicians' Narratives to Diagnostic Correctness." Proceedings of the ExProm-2012: Workshop on Extra-Propositional Aspect of Meaning in Computational Linguistics at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Ed. Roser Morante and Caroline Sporleder. Jeju, Korea: n.p., 2013. Web.
Lehrman, Michael T., Cecilia O. Alm, and Ruben A. Proano. "Detecting Distressed vs. Non- Distressed Affect State in Short Forum Texts." Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Language in Social Media at the Conference of the North Am. Chapter of the Associate. for Comp. Linguistics-Human Language Technologies. Ed. ACL/NAACL-HLT (Meena Nagarajan, Sara Owsley Sood, Michael Gamon). Montreal, Canada: n.p., 2012. Web.
Li, Rui, et al. "Learning Eye Movement Patterns for Characterization of Perceptual Expertise." Proceedings of the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA). Ed. ETRA. Santa Barbara, CA: n.p., 2012. Web.
Alm, Cecilia O. "Subjective Natural Language Problems: Motivations, Applications, Characterizations, and Implications." Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Ed. Dekang Lin, Yuji Matsumoto, Rada Mihalcea. Portland, OR: The Association for Computational Linguistic, 2011. Web.
Peer Reviewed/Juried Poster Presentation or Conference Paper
Alm, Cecilia O., Rajesh Titung, and Reynold Bailey. "Pandemic impacts on assessment of undergraduate research." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Ed. Maureen Doyle, et al. Toronoto, ON, Canada: ACM.
Alm, Cecilia O. and Reynold Bailey. "Mentoring Engagement: Contrasting Perceptions of Administrators and Faculty." Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Ed. Mark Sherriff, et al. Online, Online: Association for Computing Machinery.
External Scholarly Fellowships/National Review Committee
7/6/2023 -12/31/2023
     National Science Foundation
     Amount: 23,968
6/2/2021 -3/31/2023
     National Science Foundation
     Amount: $4,188
9/1/2021 -8/31/2026
     National Science Foundation
     Amount: $1,994,676
12/17/2019 -11/30/2020
     STINT
     Amount: 139,000 SEK, MAU, T. Pederson PI
4/1/2019 -3/31/2022
     National Science Foundation
     Amount: $379,927, incl. $20,000 supplement.
Journal Paper
Tewari, Subhra, et al. "Perceptions of Human and Machine-generated Articles." Journal of Digital Threats: Research and Practice 2. 2 (2021): 1-16. Web.
Alm, Cecilia O. and Reynold Bailey. "Transitioning from teaching to mentoring: Supporting students to adopt mentee roles." Journal of STEM Education Research 4. 1 (2021): 95-114. Web.
Vaidyanathan, Preethi, et al. "Computational framework for fusing eye movements and spoken narratives for image annotation." Journal of Vision 20. 7 (2020): 1-28. Web.
Homan, Christopher M., et al. "Quantitative methods for analyzing intimate partner violence in social media: Observational study." Journal of Medical Internet Research 22. 11 (2020): 1-15. Web.
Li, Jessica, et al. "Gaze guidance for captioned videos for DHH users." Journal on Technology and Persons with Disabilities 8. (2020): 69-81. Web.
Guo, Xuan, Qi Yu, Rui Li, Cecilia O. Alm, Cara Calvelli, Pengcheng Shi, Anne Haake,. "Intelligent medical image grouping through interactive learning." International Journal of Data Science and Analytics 2. 3 (2016): 95-105. Web.
Li, Rui, Pengcheng Shi, Jeff Pelz, Cecilia O. Alm, Anne R. Haake,. "Modeling eye movement patterns to characterize perceptual skill in image-based diagnostic reasoning processes." Computer Vision and Image Understanding 151. (2016): 138-152. Web.
Alm, Cecilia O. "Language as sensor in human-centered computing: Clinical contexts as use cases." Language & Linguistics Compass: Computational & Mathematical 10. 3 (2016): 105-119. Web.
Guo, X, et al. "From Spoken Narratives to Domain Knowledge: Mining Linguistic Data for Medical Image Understanding." Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 62. 2 (2014): 79-90. Web.
Alm, Cecilia O. "The Role of Affect in the Computational Modeling of Natural Language." Language and Linguistics Compass (Computational & Mathematical) 6. 7 (2012): 416-430. Web.
Invited Keynote/Presentation
Alm, Cecilia O. "Sensing language (+ X) for human-centered AI." Talk at the Natural Language Processing Research Group. IT University of Copenhagen. Copenhagen, Denmark. 3 Oct. 2019. Guest Lecture.
Alm, Cecilia O. "Modeling Complex Human-generated Multilevel Behaviors." IoTaP Seminar. Malmö University. Malmö, Sweden. 11 Nov. 2019. Guest Lecture.
Alm, Cecilia O. "Eliciting, Analyzing, Fusing, and Visualizing Dialogue and Gaze." Multidisciplinary Approaches to Eye-tracking Research Workshop. Malmö University. Malmö, Sweden. 24 Nov. 2019. Guest Lecture.
Mohammad, Saif and Cecilia O. Alm. "Tutorial: Computational analysis of affect and emotion in language." 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. ACL. Lisbon, Portugal. 18 Sep. 2015. Conference Presentation.
Alm, Cecilia O. "Linguistic sensing for human-centered computing." NA. Stockholm University, English Department. Stockholm, Sweden. 9 Jun. 2015. Guest Lecture.
Alm, Cecilia O. "Linguistic sensing for human-centered computing." NA. Malmo University, Computer Science Department. Malmo, Sweden. 5 Jun. 2015. Guest Lecture.
Alm, Cecilia O. "Language and multimodal meaning." NA. Xerox PARC. Rochester, NY. 30 Jan. 2015. Guest Lecture.
Alm, Cecilia O. "NLP in Multimodal Cognitive Modeling of Dermatologists' Decision-Making." Natural Language Processing: State of the Art, Future Directions and Applications for Enhancing Clinical Decision-Making. NLM/NIBI Workshop. Bethesda, MD. 23-24 Apr. 2012. Conference Presentation.
Book Chapter
Stenport, Anna W. and Cecilia O. Alm. "Corporations, the Welfare State, and Covert Misogyny in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Kick Their Asses! Feminist Perspectives on Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. 123-134. Print.
Alm, Cecilia O. "What Can Language Technologies do for Endangered Languages, and Vice Versa?" Endangered Languages: Voices and Images, FEL XV. Ed. M. Haboud and N. Ostler. Quito, Ecuador: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 2011. 98-102. Print.
Published Review
Alm, Cecilia O. "Toddler and Parent Interaction: The Organization of Gaze, Pointing and Vocalization." Rev. of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, Volume 192 by Anna Filipi, ed. Allan Bell. Journal of Sociolinguistics Apr. 2012: 294-296. Web.
Published Article
Alm, Cecilia Ovesdotter. “Characteristics of High Agreement Affect Annotation in Text.” Proceedings of theFourth Linguistic Annotation Workshop, 15-16 July 2010. 118-122. Print. «
Formal Presentation
Heimisdattir, Linda Osp, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Kateri Krantz-Odendahl, and I. Alden Coots. “A Resource for Learning Swedish Oral Skills.” INTERSPEECH 2010 Satellite Workshop on Second Language Studies: Acquisition, Learning, Education and Technology. Makuhari, Japan. 26-30 Sep. 2010. Presentation.
Alm, Cecilia Ovesdotter. “Introducing an Open Source Swedish Teaching Package: Combining Discovery-based and Thematic Learning to Address Needs and Motivations of Swedish Students.” 100th Meeting of the Society for the Advancement in Scandinavian Studies. Seattle, WA. 24 Apr. 2010. Presentation.
Alm, Cecilia Ovesdotter. “Gods as Kids in The Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok.” New Directionsin Medieval Scandinavian Studies. 30th Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval Studies. Lincoln Center, New York. 27-28 Mar. 2010. Presentation.

Currently Teaching

DSCI-790
1 - 3 Credits
This course provides the graduate student an opportunity to explore an aspect of data science independently and in depth, under the direction of an advisor. The student selects a topic and then works with a faculty member to describe the value of the work and the deliverables.
IDAI-610
3 Credits
This course covers the underlying theories and algorithms used in the field of artificial intelligence. Topics include the history of AI, search algorithms (such as A*, game search and constraint satisfaction), logic and logic programming, planning, and an overview of machine learning. Programming assignments, including implementation of AI algorithms, and oral/written summaries of research papers are required.
IDAI-620
3 Credits
This course introduces the mathematical background necessary to understand, design, and effectively deploy AI systems. It focuses on four key areas of mathematics: (1) linear algebra, which enables describing, storing, analyzing and manipulating large-scale data; (2) optimization theory, which provides a framework for training AI systems; (3) probability and statistics, which underpin many machine learning algorithms and systems; and (4) numerical analysis, which illuminates the behavior of mathematical and statistical algorithms when implemented on computers.
IDAI-700
3 Credits
This course will familiarize students with foundational concepts and emerging ideas in the ethics of artificial intelligence and their implications for public policy. It will be broken down into three sections: (1) the ethics of machine learning; (2) the moral status of AI; and (3) AI and the distant future. The first section will consider such topics as the ethical implications of unconscious bias in machine learning (e.g., in predictive text, facial recognition, speech dialogue systems); what constraints should govern the behavior of autonomous and semi-autonomous machines such as drones and smart cars; whether AI can undermine valuable social institutions and perhaps to democracy itself and what might be done to mitigate such risk; and how automation might transform the labor economy and whether this morally desirable. The second section turns to the question of our moral obligations toward (some) artificial intelligences. Here, we will ask what grounds moral status in general and how this might apply to artificial intelligences in particular, including how should we should balance moral obligations toward (some) AIs with competing obligations toward human beings and other creatures with morally protectable interests. The final section will look to the far distant future and consider how (if at all) we might identify and estimate future threats from AI and what might be done today to protect all those who matter morally.
IDAI-710
3 Credits
This course is an introduction to machine learning theories and algorithms. Topics include an overview of data collection, sampling and visualization techniques, supervised and unsupervised learning and graphical models. Specific techniques that may be covered include classification (e.g., support vector machines, tree-based models, neural networks), regression, model selection and some deep learning techniques. Programming assignments and oral/written summaries of research papers are required.
IDAI-720
3 Credits
Hallmarks of AI are systems that perform human-like behaviors, and AI systems rely on continuous preparation and deployment of data resources as new tasks emerge. In this course, students develop their conceptual, applied, and critical understanding about (1) experimental principles and methods guiding the collection, validation, and deployment of human data resources for AI systems; (2) human-centered AI concepts and techniques including dataset bias, debiasing, AI fairness, humans-in-the loop methods, explainable AI, trust), and (3) best practices for technical writing and presentation about AI. As a milestone, based on research review, students will write and present an experimental design proposal for dataset elicitation followed by computational experimentation, with description and visualization of the intended experiment setup, as well as critical reflection of benefits, limitations, and implications in the context of AI system development and deployment.
PSYC-681
3 Credits
This course provides theoretical foundation as well as hands-on (lab-style) practice in computational approaches for processing natural language text, for problems that involve natural language meaning and structure. The course has relevance to cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and science and technology fields. Machine learning, including standard and recent neural network methods, is a central component of this course. Students will develop natural language processing solutions individually or in teams using Python, and explore additional relevant tools. Expected: Programming skills, demonstrated by coursework or instructor approval.

In the News

  • December 6, 2023

    Computer generated image of a man with glasses and layers of images composed on top of his shirt in an artsy way.

    Generative AI is changing education

    Like many fields, the world of academia is wrestling with the challenges and opportunities presented by generative AI tools. While a few K-12 school districts, international universities, and businesses have attempted to ban the use of AI tools, RIT is acknowledging that it’s here to stay and can be used as a force for good.

  • January 31, 2022

    student wearing sensors on her head adjusts a robotic arm.

    AI research collaboration begins

    Cecilia Alm, an associate professor in RIT’s College of Liberal Arts, was awarded nearly $2 million by the National Science Foundation to lead a team of RIT faculty addressing a lack of diversity in the artificial intelligence research community and gaps in AI curricula.