He currently serves as a research professor in the Language Technologies Institute at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Hauptmann started at the Johns Hopkins University in 1978 and received a BA and an MA in psychology in 1982.
In 2003, he received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, for the Informedia Digital Library, with H. Wactlar, M. Christel, T. Kanade and S. Stevens.
[2] In the area of man-machine communication, according to Hauptmann (2008), "he is interested in the tradeoffs between different modalities, including gestures and speech, and in the intuitiveness of interaction protocols.
The latter theme was also the focus of my thesis, which investigated the use of machine learning on large text samples to acquire the knowledge needed for semantic natural language understanding".