My research area is dialogue management, and models of the conversational aspects of speech, such as turn-taking, discourse markers, disfluencies, and stuttering. I conduct empirical studies to better understand how people engage in these activities, and build computation models, for understanding what people are doing, and for building better spoken dialogue systems.  My current projects include understanding how people engage in turn-taking, so that there is little overlap or delay in conversation; understanding how people with mild cognitive disorder manage misunderstandings, and building tools, based on automatic speech recognition, that can assist clinicians in treating people who stutter.

As an instructor for the Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering Graduate Programs, Prof. Heeman teaches these courses:

CS 560/660 Artificial Intelligence

CS 533/633 Automata & Formal Languages

CS 532/632 Analysis and Design of Algorithms