Marge McShane is a cognitive scientist, computational linguist and knowledge engineer who develops cognitive models of intelligent agents that can collaborate with people in task-oriented, dialog applications. She is particularly interested in the integration of functionalities that are often treated in isolation, such as physiological simulation, emotion modeling and the many aspects of cognition. 

One aspect of cognition to which she has devoted particular attention is natural language processing, approached from a cross-linguistic perspective and with the goal of producing machine-tractable descriptions that can support sophisticated conversational agents. McShane was a central contributor to the Boas system, a proof-of-concept system that elicited knowledge about any of the world’s languages from linguistically untrained native speakers. Boas used a mixed-initiative strategy, by which the system guided certain aspects of the knowledge compilation process and the user took the lead in others. Among the key requirements were that the system accommodate descriptions of not only anticipated, but also unanticipated, phenomena; that the descriptions be sufficiently formal to directly provide support to a generic machine translation engine; and that the system be usable by informants without the support of developers.

McShane has also worked extensively on cognitive modeling in the medical domain, to support the configuration of intelligent agents playing the roles of virtual patients and tutors in training applications such as the Maryland Virtual Patient system. Guided by the functional needs of such agents, McShane has recently begun to pursue the modeling of “mindreading” (otherwise known as mental model ascription), defined as inferring features of another human or artificial agent that cannot be directly observed, such as that agent's beliefs, plans, goals, intentions, personality traits, mental and emotional states, and knowledge about the world. This capability is an essential functionality of intelligent agents if they are to engage in sophisticated collaborations with people.

McShane has authored two books, A Theory of Ellipsis (Oxford University Press, 2005) and An Innovative, Practical Approach to Polish Inflection (Lincom Europa, 2003), and has published extensively in the areas of linguistics, natural language processing, cognitive modeling and knowledge representation.

James Hendler is the Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at RPI.  He also heads the RPI-IBM Center for Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning and Semantics (HEALS) and serves as a Chair of the Board of the UK’s charitable Web Science Trust. 

One of the originators of the “Semantic Web,” Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the AAAI, BCS, the IEEE, the AAAS and the ACM. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. He is also the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing editors for Science. 

In 2010, Hendler was named one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine and was selected as an “Internet Web Expert” by the US government. In 2013, he was appointed as the Open Data Advisor to New York State and in 2015 appointed a member of the US Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee. In 2016, became a member of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information and in 2018 became chair of the ACM’s US technology policy committee and was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.