John Niekrasz is a Technical Manager in the Advanced Analytics group of SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center. His core interests center on the use of automated discourse analysis in support of technologies that understand purposes and intentions in language use, particularly in informal and conversational genres. His published research includes automated essay scoring, speech summarization, linguistic pragmatics, conversational communication, discourse segmentation, information extraction, dialogue systems, and human-computer interfaces.

Prior to joining SRI in 2010, Niekrasz was at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information, where he carried out research for the DARPA Personal Assistant that Learns (PAL) program. There, under the SRI-led Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project, he developed a personal meeting assistant and studied methods for automatically extracting action items and decisions during spoken meetings. His subsequent doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh was conducted as part of the EU-funded Augmented Multi-party Interaction (AMI) project, which investigated automated content linking and indexing to support spoken conversations in real time.

Niekrasz holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and a B.S. in symbolic systems from Stanford University. His dissertation examined algorithms for automatically summarizing communicative activities in multi-party face-to-face conversations.