News

Recent Accomplishments in the last 12 months

Jordan Boyd-Graber

• Surviving
• Invited talks at Rutgers, JHU, Hopkins, Colorado, and MITH
• 3 papers at ACL, 1 at NAACL, 1 at WWW, 1 at ICML
• Contributing member of NLTK
• PC for ICML, ACL, EMNLP, AISTATS
• Revamped Compling 2

Hal Daume III

• Tutorial presented at AAAI 2011 on structured prediction and imitation learning; workshops organized at ICML (reducing label cost in learning) and ACL (multilingual modeling)
• Invited talks presented at: TextGraphs Workshop, International Workshop on Speech and Machine Learning, Tokyo Institute of Technology, University of Trento, University of Toronto, Temple University
• Funded research: DARPA CSSG grant on domain adaptation for machine translation, Yahoo Faculty Research Initiative Gift, NSF grant on learning for spatial hearing (joint with Ramani Duraswami), DARPA BOLT grant on machine translation (joint with Doug Oard, Jimmy Lin, Philip Resnik).
• First student (Piyush Rai) graduating, will be the inaugural Sheldon Ekland-Olson Postdoctoral Fellow at UT Austin, joint between the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation
• Best paper award with Jay Pujara and Lise Getoor at the Conference for Email and Anti-Spam 2011
• Over a dozen accepted papers at top-tier NLP and ML conferences for 2011, more coming for 2012
• Serving on the editorial board for the newly-formed journal Transactions of the ACL, also on editorial boards for Machine Learning Journal and Computational Linguistics
• Area chair for AAAI, ICML and EMNLP 2012; reviewer for countless other conferences
• Executive committee member for IGERT program on language science at UMD

David Doermann

Submitted gazillion proposals.

Bonnie Dorr

Funded ginormous numbers of proposals.

Naomi Feldman

• Two internal pilot grants: RASA award on "Modeling bilingual sound category acquisition", ADVANCE seed grant (with Rochelle Newman from HESP) on "Children's real-time processing of sounds and words"
• Three papers accepted to Cognitive Science Society conference this August
• Invited talks at IPAM Graduate Summer School on Probabilistic Models of Cognition, Yale linguistics
• Faculty advisor for student-organized Mayfest workshop: The Role of Computational Models in Linguistic Theory
• Member of program committee for workshops Psychocomputational Models of Language Acquisition (at LSA) and Cognitive Models and Computational Linguistics (at NAACL); reviewer for various conferences/journals
• Developed and taught computational psycholinguistics modeling course; enrollment was 50% women; at least two students will go on to take CL1 next fall

Jimmy Lin

What else ... tweeted and mapped and reduced.

Doug Oard

Something to do with being a fearless lab leader and deanish stuff.

Louiqa Raschid

PattArAn: NSF grant. Collaboration with plant biologists at the University of Maryland. 
  Potential contributions to the Arabidopsis community.
SM3: NSF grant. Social media modeling, prediction and recommendation. 
  Multiple papers in collaboration with Shanchan Wu and Hassan Sayyadi and 
  Smith colleague - Bill Rand and Yogesh Joshi and Liye Ma and Prem Swaroop .
PAnG: Tool for graph data mining of annotated graph datasets. 
  Collaboration with Samir Khuller and multiple papers. 
  Mentoring of several undergraduate students.
Next Generation Financial Cyberinfrastructure: Workshops in July 2010 and July 2012
  sponsored by the NSF and CRA/CCC.

Philip Resnik

Desperately trying to remember that he's on sabbatical.

Media

• An article in HealthLeaders Media entitled Are EMRs Killing the Clinical Narrative? covered my SXSW 2012 talk (slides, audio) and appears to have stirred up some interesting discussion. Which is great, since that's exactly what the talk was designed for.

• Was really pleased to be included among those quoted in discussions by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy", Carl Bialik, about mining Twitter for public opinion, including both the print column and the accompanying blog post.

• Had great fun guesting on the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU 88.5 in Washington DC, talking about New Frontiers in Political Polling: Social Media and "Sentiment Analysis". We discussed computational analysis of social media in the context of political campaigns, which was also the topic of a recent posting I did on Language Log called #CompuPolitics; we also briefly discussed the React Labs project, in which collaborators and I are developing a smartphone app for large scale, real-time collection of people's responses during live events like political debates.

• Quoted in the New Scientist story on Siri.

• Collaborative work with Ben Bederson and students on monolingual translation crowdsourcing discussed in Jim Giles, New Scientist, Issue 2818, The man-machine: Harnessing humans in a hive mind.

Talks and Meetings

• Spoke on a panel at the National Institutes of Health Workshop on Natural Language Processing: State of the Art, Future Directions and Applications for Enhancing Clinical Decision-Making. Slides here and there should be a full videocast of the workshop available at NIH soon.

• Participated as an invited delegate at TEDMED 2012.

• Gave an invited plenary lecture at the 2012 American Association for Applied Linguistics conference, entitled The Linguistics of Spin: A Computational Linguist's Forays into Social Science. (During the talk I used myself as a guinea pig for the React Labs live polling app that I'm developing; results can be found here.)

• Spoke at South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) on Language Technology, Electronic Health Records, and the Clinical Narrative; slides available here, with audio here.

• Spoke at Google Research on crowdsourcing and translation, to kick off a new Google-funded collaboration involving me, Ben Bederson, and Chris Callison-Burch that we're calling "Translate the World".

• Gave the keynote talk at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, a technology/business event focused on, yes, sentiment analysis.

• Gave an invited keynote talk, "Computer Assisted Coding and Beyond: An Academic's Adventures with Clinical Natural Language Processing in the Real World", at the ACL/HLT 2011 BioNLP Workshop

• Spoke on "Computer Assisted Coding and Beyond: An Academic's Adventures with Clinical Natural Language Processing in the Real World" at the National Library of Medicine.

Research Awards

• Awarded National Science Foundation funding for a new project in computational political science in collaboration with computer scientist Noah Smith (CMU) and political scientists Amber Boydstun (UC Davis) and Justin Gross (UNC Chapel Hill). The project will develop new computational modeling methods, grounded in data-driven computational linguistics, aimed at improving the scientific understanding of how issues are framed by political elites, the media, and the public.

• Awarded DARPA funding for a pilot project on advanced analysis of social media in collaboration with BBN and Converseon, Inc.

• Received new Google Research Award funding for a collaboration involving me, Ben Bederson, and Chris Callison-Burch entitled "Translate the World".

• Student poster entitled Using Monolingual Crowds to Improve Translation, presented by Yakov Kronrod (Linguistics), featuring work by Yakov, Chang Hu (CS), Olivia Buzek (CS and Linguistics undergrad, now a PhD student at JHU), and Alexander J. Quinn (CS) on our monolingual translation project (collaboration with Ben Bederson) was named the winning poster in the Math, Technology, and Engineering category at the 2011 AAAS Student Poster Competition.