Distinguished Lecture Series

Kathleen McKeown, Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director, Data Science Institute, Columbia University

McKeown’s research is in natural language processing, summarization, natural language generation and analysis of social media. In these areas, her work focuses on text summarization and generating updates on disasters over live, streaming information, generating messages about electricity usage and using reinforcement learning over usage logs to determine what kinds of messages can change behavior and the analysis of social media to detect messages about aggression and loss. While at Columbia, McKeown has served as the director of the Data Science Institute, was department chair from 1998-2003 and was the vice dean for research for the School of Engineering and Applied Science for two years. McKeown is also active internationally, having served as president, vice president and secretary-treasurer of the Association of Computational Linguistics as well as a board member and secretary of the board for the Computing Research Association.