CV

GABRIEL RECCHIA
Department of Cognitive Science
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN, 47405

IU Cognitive Computing Laboratory

Jump to education, grants and awards
Jump to publications on semantic memory
Jump to presentations on semantic memory
Jump to presentations on virtual agents and games
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EDUCATION
2003-2007, B.S. in Symbolic Systems (Honors and With Distinction), Stanford University
2007-2012, Ph.D. in Cognitive Science (minor: Computational Linguistics),
Indiana University at Bloomington


GRANTS AND AWARDS
2009 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Honorable Mention
2008 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Honorable Mention
2008 Society for Computers in Psychology’s Castellan Award for Best Student Paper
2007 Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research
2007 Accepted to Phi Beta Kappa
2005 Recipient of research grant from Undergraduate Research Programs (‘The Role of High-Level Knowledge in Event Perception’), Stanford University ($1,200)
2003 Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology Regional Finalist (awarded 2003, funds received 2010; $1,000)


RESEARCH

Dissertation

Recchia, G. L. (2012). Investigating the semantics of abstract concepts: Evidence from a property generation game. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University.

Publications and Proceedings

Recchia, G. L., & Jones, M. N. (2012). The semantic richness of abstract concepts. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6:315. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00315

Jones, M. N., Johns, B. T., Recchia, G. L. (2012). The role of semantic diversity in lexical organization. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 121-132.

Hard, B., Recchia, G., & Tversky, B. (2011). The shape of action. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(4), 586-604.

Cox, G., Kachergis, G., Recchia, G., & Jones, M. N. (2011). Towards a scalable holographic representation of word form. Behavior Research Methods, 43(3), 602-615.

Jones, M. N., Gruenenfelder, T. M., & Recchia, G. (2011). In defense of spatial models of lexical semantics. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3444-3449). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Kachergis, G., Recchia, G., & Shiffrin, R. M. (2011). Adaptive magnitude and valence biases in a dynamic memory task. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 819-824). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Recchia, G. L., Jones, M. N., Sahlgren, M., & Kanerva, P. (2010). Encoding sequential information in vector space models of semantics: Comparing holographic reduced representation and random permutation. In S. Ohlsson and R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Cognitive Science Society, 865-870.

Jones, M. N., & Recchia, G. L. (2010). You can’t wear a coat rack: A binding framework to avoid illusory feature migrations in perceptually grounded semantic models. In S. Ohlsson and R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Cognitive Science Society, 877-882.

Recchia, G., & Jones, M. N. (2009). More data trumps smarter algorithms: Training computational models of semantics on very large corpora. Behavior Research Methods, 41(3), 647-656.

Recchia, G., Johns, B. T., & Jones, M. N. (2008). Context repetition benefits are dependent on context redundancy. In V. Sloutsky, K. McRae, & B. Love (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Cognitive Science Society, 267-272.

Hard, B. and Recchia, G. (2006). Reading the language of action. In R. Sun & N. Miyake (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Cognitive Science Society, 1434-1439.

 

Conference Presentations
(see above “Publications and Proceedings” for conference presentations not listed below)

 

Language and Semantic Memory

Recchia, G. (2013). The role of distinctive features and contexts in semantic organization. Invited talk presented at the University of Memphis Cognitive Science Seminar, Memphis, TN.

Recchia, G. & Jones, M. N. (2012). The role of context in abstract concept representation. Talk presented at the Midwest Cognitive Science Conference in Bloomington, IN.

Recchia, G. & Jones, M. N. (2012). Different representational frameworks for abstract and concrete words? A closer look. Poster presented at the 2012 Context & Episodic Memory Symposium in Bloomington, IN.

Recchia, G., Kievit-Kylar, B., Jones, M. N., & McRae, K. (2011). Using web games to elicit associative and feature-based conceptual representations. Poster presented at the Society for Computers in Psychology.

Recchia, G. & Jones, M. N. (2011). Crowdsourcing large-scale semantic feature norms. Talk presented at the Midwest Cognitive Science Conference in East Lansing, MI.

Kuperman, V., Bresnan, J., & Recchia, G. (2011). Incremental production of the English dative constructions. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

Recchia, G. L., & Jones, M. N. (2010). Modeling semantic feature effects without features. Poster presented at the Society for Computers in Psychology.

Kuperman, V., Bresnan, J., Recchia, G. & Ford, M. (2010). Converging evidence from production and comprehension of dative constructions in English. Poster presented at the CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference.

Cox, G. E., Kachergis, G., Recchia, G. L., & Jones, M. N. (2010). Towards a scalable holographic word-form representation. Paper presented at the Society for Computers in Psychology.

Recchia, G., & Jones, M. N. (2009). Encoding sequential information in vector space models of semantics. Paper presented at the Society for Computers in Psychology.

Recchia, G., & Jones, M. N. (2008). More data trumps smarter algorithms: Training computational models of semantics on very large corpora. Paper presented at the Society for Computers in Psychology. Won Castellan Award for Best Student Paper.

Jones, M. N., Hills, T., Recchia, G., Dawson, J. D., & Todd, P. M. (2008). Modeling transition latency in the semantic fluency task. Paper presented at the Society for Computers in Psychology.

Recchia, G. (2008). STRATA: A Search Tool for Richly Annotated and Time-Aligned Data. Poster presented at the Society for Computers in Psychology.

 

Virtual Agents and Game Design

Smith-Robbins, S., Ricci, M., Jameson, E., & Recchia, G. (2012). Using ARGs for learning: Creating games with social media. Workshop presented as part of the Games and Learning Event Series, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, Indiana University.

Beasley, A., & Recchia, G. (2012). Virtual agents and motivation: Toward an empirical link. Poster to be presented at the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Fennewald, T., Recchia, G. & Jameson, E. (2011). Examining reflective awareness in gaming experience. Talk presented at Games for Change in New York, NY.

Recchia, G., Mota, P., Fennewald, T., & Jameson, E. (2011). Happy pets, happy players: Designing virtual pets to foster mindfulness and collaborative practices. Poster presented at Games, Learning, and Society in Madison, WI.

Recchia, G. & Saleh, A. (2011). Connecting ethical choices in games to moral frameworks. Ethical Inquiry through Video Game Play and Design: A Symposium, Prindle Institute for Ethics, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN.

 

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS AND SERVICE

2013: Cognition (Reviewer)
2013: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Reviewer)
2012: Games, Learning, & Society (Volunteer)
2012: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology (co-reviewer with Michael N. Jones)
2012: Behavior Research Methods (Reviewer)
2011: Games, Learning, & Society (Reviewer)
2011: Association for Psychological Science (Student Affiliate)
2011: American Psychological Association (Student Affiliate)
2010: Behaviour & Information Technology (Reviewer)
2010: GPSO Travel Awards Committee (Reviewer)
2006, 2008, 2010: Cognitive Science Society (Student Member)

 

EMPLOYERS AND LAB AFFILIATIONS

University of Memphis, 2013-present

Institute for Intelligent Systems, Multimodal Aspects of Discourse (MAD) Lab
(advisor: Max M. Louwerse)
Postdoctoral fellow

  • Developing algorithms that estimate geographical information (e.g., longitude, latitude, and population size of a city) from text (e.g., newspapers that do not explicitly describe such geographical information)

Indiana University, 2007-2012

Cognitive Computing Lab
(advisor: Michael N. Jones)
Doctoral candidate, associate instructor, graduate research assistant

  • Developed and investigated computational models of semantic representation, with special attention to demonstrating how simple, neurally plausible mechanisms can extract meaning from noisy, unsupervised data
  • Served as associate instructor for Experiments and Models in Cognition (Q270) and Statistical Techniques (K300)


Stanford University, 2003-2007

Spoken Syntax Lab (advisors: Joan Bresnan, Tom Wasow)

  • Developed search and analysis tools for repositories of temporal, phonological, syntactic and semantic annotations of spontaneous speech
  • Added temporal alignments and other information to a database of 2,350 English datives from the Switchboard corpus; investigated syntactic priming of the dative alternation with the R statistical package

Space, Time, and Action Research Lab (director: Barbara Tversky; supervisor: Bridgette Hard)

  • Awarded URP grant of $1,200 for research on hierarchical encoding of events in action perception
  • Developed computational metric for quantifying low-level cues in perceived action; assisted in data analysis and conducting experiments

Social Cognitive Development Lab (supervisor: Bridgette Hard)

  • Created experimental stimuli for eye-tracking study and assisted in conducting experiments

SemLab (director: Stanley Peters; supervisor: Elizabeth Bratt)

  • Contributed to development of speech interface of DC-Train, a Navy damage control simulator
  • Developed coding scheme for speech acts and coded videos of tutor-student interactions in Transana

 

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Significant real-world experience (see above employers and lab affiliations) with C#, Java, Python, Perl, VB.NET, Excel VBA, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, as well as statistical packages such as R and SPSS.

Proficient with algorithms, software packages and resources frequently used in semantic modeling, including NLTK, WordNet, LSA, HAL, BEAGLE, random indexing, etc.