Rate My Professor Casey Kennington

Casey Kennington is an Associate Professor and the Boise State Foundation Board Endowed Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at Boise State University. He directs the Speech, Language, and Interactive Machines (SLIM) research group, which develops computational models of spoken dialogue inspired by linguistics and psychology, implementing systems for digital personal assistants, robot commands, and conversational chatbots. Kennington earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Bielefeld University in Germany, an M.S. in Computational Linguistics from Saarland University, an M.S. in Cognitive Science from Université Nancy 2 (now Université de Lorraine) through the Erasmus Mundus LCT program, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University. His career includes prior roles as a Research Intern at Honda Research Institute, Research Assistant at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and Software Engineer at the Missionary Training Center. He chairs the Outreach and Recruitment Committee in his department and contributes to data science and AI efforts across campus, teaching courses in Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, and Data Science.

Kennington's research focuses on machine learning and human-robot interaction, particularly dialogue systems, computational linguistics, natural language processing, semantics, and language acquisition. He explores how language models learn, represent, and process natural human language, developing smaller models that utilize multimodal data beyond text, and infrastructure for natural spoken communication with robots. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, was named an inaugural National Science Foundation AI Education Fellow in 2026, and appointed the first Boise State Foundation Board Endowed Professor of Computer Science in 2025. His influential publications include 'Spoken Language Interaction with Robots: Recommendations for Future Research' (2022, cited 186 times), 'Reporting Guidelines for Large Language Models in Human–Robot Interaction' (2026, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction), 'Prior Lessons of Incremental Dialogue and Robot Action Management for the Age of Language Models' (2025, Dialogue and Discourse), 'Recognizing and Generating Novel Emotional Behaviors on Two Robotic Platforms' (2025, IEEE/RSJ IROS), and editorial work on 'Dialogue with Robots: Constructive Approaches for Understanding Communication' (2025, Frontiers in Robotics and AI). With over 1,654 citations on Google Scholar and 81 research outputs documented on Boise State Experts@Boisestate, Kennington's work advances interactive spoken dialogue systems and human-robot interaction.