This week it was announced that MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Regina Barzilay was named an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow for her research contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
Fellows are selected for significant research, technical, or service-focused contributions to the theory or practice of AI, spanning industry, government, or academia. Fellows are nominated by the AAAI Fellows Selections Committee.
Barzilay, who is the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, does research in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, including applying machine learning methods to oncology and drug design.
Her work spans many areas of NLP, from syntactic parsing and the deciphering of dead languages, to developing new ways to train neural networks that can provide rationales for their decisions. In addition to her research, she recently was awarded a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a “genius grant.”
Current AAAI fellows on the MIT faculty include professor emeritus Rodney Brooks, and MIT professors/CSAIL principal investigators Randall Davis, Tommi Jaakkola, Leslie Kaelbling, Tomas Lozano-Perez, Daniela Rus, Howard Shrobe, Gerald Sussman, Peter Szolovits, Brian Williams, and Patrick Winston.