Thoughtlets is a blog written and maintained by Andrew Lampert in Sydney, Australia.

I work as a Research Engineer in the Information Engineering Laboratory at the North Ryde lab of the CSIRO ICT Centre (on campus at Macquarie University).

I completed my Masters studies through the Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre in the Linguistics department at Macquarie University, and am currently a PhD student in the Centre for Language Technology, supervised by Professor Robert Dale and Dr Cécile Paris.

I spend my time at CSIRO researching, designing and implementing software and algorithms for coherent, context-sensitive information delivery. This generally involves concepts and techniques for Natural Language Generation, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, Text Classification, User Modelling, Task Modelling etc. in a variety of project contexts.

At CSIRO, I am the software architect (and formerly lead developer) for our platform for contextualised information retrieval and information delivery, known as Myriad. The core of Myriad is our natural language generation engine, called the Virtual Document Planner (VDP). Myriad has been applied in several applications, ranging from task-based adaptive GUIs through to dynamic report generation systems and a prototype that provides tailored instructional text for surgical training within a 3D haptic environment.

My PhD research is exploring linguistic patterns in email and other textual conversation. In particular, I’m investigating the nature of tasks in email, and looking to improve the way people manage and monitor tasks in email.

I’ve been an elected member of the executive committee for the Australasian Language Technology Association since 2005, and coordinator for the long-running CSIRO HAIL Seminar series since 2002.