The Grainger College of Engineering

Margaret M Fleck

Margaret M Fleck
Margaret M Fleck
  • Teaching Professor
  • Research Associate Professor
(217) 265-6838
3214 Siebel Center for Comp Sci

For More Information

Education

  • Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sept. 1988
  • M.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sept. 1985
  • B.A., Linguistics, Yale University, May 1982

Teaching Statement

I have taught a wide range of courses over the years and have built extensive course materials for Discrete Structures and Artificial Intelligence. I focus on building materials that are easy for students to learn from. Specifically my courses feature frequent small assignments and assessments, textbooks and notes that are easy to read, and interleaving underlying techniques with applications.

Course Development

  • CS 440 (Artificial Intelligence), video lectures, lecture notes, new topic sequence, autograded programming assignments (Fall 2018 to Fall 2021)
  • CS 173 (Discrete Structures), new textbook, video lectures, on-line homework and exams (Fall 2008 to Spring 2021)

Research Statement

My recent research centers around understanding conversational speech, particularly unsupervised algorithms that learn word boundaries from transcribed speech. I am also interested in use of prosodic features (e.g. stress, duration) in language modelling and language acquisition.

I worked in image understanding for many years and retain an interest in that area. I also have a long-term interest in building better programming language support for AI and have implemented a hybrid LISP/C package for computer vision applications and a hybrid Scheme/C package for linguistic work. At Hewlett-Packard Labs and U. Illinois, I have worked on systems that provide guidebooks and collect annotated records of personal experiences.

Research Interests

  • Computational LInguistics

Research Areas

Articles in Conference Proceedings

  • Margaret M. Fleck. "Lexicalized Phonotactic Word Segmentation," Annual Meeting, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2008, pp. 130-138. (acceptance rate 25%)

Teaching Honors

  • Rose Teaching Award (April 2019)

Recent Courses Taught

  • CS 100 - Computer Science Orientation
  • CS 173 - Discrete Structures
  • CS 196 73 - Freshman Honors
  • CS 440 (ECE 448) - Artificial Intelligence

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