Research Scientist
Nate Blaylock received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Rochester in 2005 where his dissertation dealt with natural language understanding and plan recognition for dialog systems. Prior to joining IHMC in 2007, Nate was a Research Scientist at Cycorp, where his research focused on using predictive event models to apply plan recognition to level 2/3 fusion problems. Prior to that, Nate spent two years in a postdoctoral position at Saarland University in Saarbrucken, Germany, where he helped build the bilingual German/English SAMMIE in-car dialog system, using the theory of collaborative problem solving from his thesis to understand and reason with natural language in dialog. At IHMC, Nate continues to do research on dialog systems, plan and intent recognition, and natural language understanding, including information extraction in the medical and geospatial domains.
In addition to research, Nate has taken an active leadership role in many research projects. In Germany, Nate managed the university's research effort under the EU-funded TALK Project (a large, multi-university research project). At Cycorp, Nate oversaw a DARPA seed effort on Bootstrapped Learning and led an ONR-funded effort on information fusion. While at IHMC, Nate has managed a DoD geospatial language understanding effort, a plan recognition project for ARL, and a technology transfer effort under DARPA's CALO project in which the PLOW dialog system was ported to and evaluated at the Naval Hospital Pensacola to help increase efficiency in appointment booking. Nate is currently leading the NLP effort in a large NIH grant to extract information from clinical medical records.
Webpage (includes links to CV, publications, etc.)