Save the dates! Fall 2017 Lineup for the Joint CSE/IST Colloquium Series in Natural Language Processing.

We are excited to announce the lineup for the second year of our Joint CSE/IST Colloquium Series in Natural Language Processing! 🎉

Ani Nenkova is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main areas of research are computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, with emphasis on developing computational methods for analysis of text quality and style, discourse, affect recognition and summarization. She obtained her PhD degree in computer science from Columbia University.

Diane is a Professor of Computer Science, and a Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, and A.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Her research interests are in the areas of artificial intelligence and education, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language learning, spoken language, and user modeling.

Julia Hirschberg, whose talk will be sponsored by the James F. Kelly Distinguished Lecture series, is Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She has numerous honors and awards, including a (founding) ACL Fellow since 2011, an ACM Fellow since 2016, a AAAI fellow since 1994, an ISCA Fellow since 2008, an IEEE Fellow since 2017, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 2017. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014 and as an Honorary Member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology in the same year. Her research interests in Natural Language Processing are in empirical and corpus-based studies of intonation (prosody) and discourse; automatic detection of emotion, charisma, and deception in speech; hedging behavior in text and speech; spoken dialogue systems; speech search for low resource languages; code-switching; text-to-speech synthesis; and annotation standards for speech corpora.

Jason Eisner is Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing, the Machine Learning Group, the Cognitive Science Department, and the national Center of Excellence in Human Language Technology. His goal is to develop the probabilistic modeling, inference, and learning techniques needed for a unified model of all kinds of linguistic structure. His 100+ papers have presented various algorithms for parsing, machine translation, and weighted finite-state machines; formalizations, algorithms, theorems, and empirical results in computational phonology; and unsupervised or semi-supervised learning methods for syntax, morphology, and word-sense disambiguation. He is also the lead designer of Dyna, a new declarative programming language that provides an infrastructure for AI research. He has received two school-wide awards for excellence in teaching.

The Colloquium Series will be held in 113 IST Building, The Cybertorium, on Fridays at 2 PM. More information will be posted 🔜