Roth Named ACM Fellow for 2011

Computer Science professor Dan Roth was named a 2011 ACM Fellow for his “contributions to machine learning and natural language processing.” 

Roth’s research interests focus on the computational foundations of intelligent behavior. He has made seminal contributions to several aspects of this problem—from theoretical questions in Learning and Reasoning, to new models and algorithms that have contributed significantly to the use of machine learning and inference techniques in natural language processing. Advances made by Roth have changed how computer scientists develop algorithms and programs for natural language understanding, and how they think about computational modeling of learning and reasoning.

In his research, Roth has pursued several interrelated lines of work that span multiple aspects of this problem - from fundamental questions in learning and inference and how they interact, to the study of a range of natural language processing (NLP) problems, including multiple disambiguation problems, shallow parsing, semantic role labeling, co-reference, question answering and textual entailment, to large scale Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction system development - resulting in a number of software packages for NLP tools.

He has published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning and learning theory, and has developed advanced machine learning based tools for natural language applications that are being used widely by the research community, including an award winning Semantic Parser.

Roth is the director of the DHS Institute of Discrete Science Center for Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis Research (MIAS). He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the premier AI professional society and was an NSF CAREER Award winner. Roth received his PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995 and is a Willett Faculty Scholar of the College of Engineering.

The ACM Fellows Program celebrates the exceptional contributions of the leading members in the computing field. These individuals have helped to enlighten researchers, developers, practitioners and end-users of information technology throughout the world. These new ACM Fellows join a distinguished list of colleagues to whom ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership in computing and information technology.
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Contact: Dan Roth, Department of Computer Science, 217/244-7068.

Writer: Jennifer LaMontagne, associate director of communications, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4049.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.