Computer and Information Science
Join Ruzena Bajcsy, Susan Davidson, Stephanie Weirich and Linh Phan for a panel discussion on:
Tuesday, March 28, 2023 5:00 to 6:00 PM Glandt Forum | Singh Center for Nanotechnology | 3205 Walnut Street
This event will be recorded and posted here at a later date
Abstract: Women have always been part of computing at Penn, from the women who programmed the ENIAC, to the first woman faculty member, Ruzena Bajcsy, who arrived in 1972 as the CIS department was being formed, to new faculty members joining this year. This panel, consisting of women CIS faculty members from different decades over the past fifty years, will discuss what their experiences have been like, addressing the department and research environment, teaching, and climate for women.
Ruzena Bajcsy
Professor Emeritus Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley; Computer and Information Science, Penn Engineering
Ruzena Bajcsy obtained the Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in 1957 and 1967, and the Ph.D. in computer science in 1972 from Stanford University. She joined the faculty of Penn’s CIS department as it was founded in 1972, and was the first woman to hold an administrative position in Penn Engineering when she became the CIS department chair in 1985.
While at Penn, Ruzena founded the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory (GRASP), where she introduced the idea of active perception in robotics. In 1998, Ruzena became the first woman to head the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation, where she had authority over a $500 million budget and helped establish the foundation’s Information Technology Research program. In 2001, she retired from Penn and left NSF to become the NEC professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Director Emeritus of CITRIS (the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2021 she has been an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley as well as at Penn..
Dr. Bajcsy has received many awards and honors for her groundbreaking accomplishments. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; recipient of the 2001 ACM/Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell Award, the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences, the 2009 ABIE Award for Technical Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute, the 2013 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award, and 2016 NAE Simon Ramo Founders Award for life achievements.
Ruzena is the mother of computer-science professor Klara Nahrstedt, who received her Ph.D. from Penn CIS in 1995 and who also became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2022. Ruzena and Klara are the first mother-daughter NAE members.
Susan B. Davidson
Weiss Professor Computer and Information Science Penn Engineering
Susan B. Davidson received the B.A. degree in Mathematics from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1978, and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, Princeton NJ, in 1980 and 1982. Dr. Davidson is the Weiss Professor of Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has been since 1982.
Dr. Davidson was the founding co-director of the Penn Center for Bioinformatics from 1997-2003, the founding co-director of the Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance, served as Deputy Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2005-200 and then as Chair of CIS from 2008-2013. She currently serves as the faculty co-Director of the MSE in Data Science program. Her research interests include data management for data science, database and web-based systems, provenance, crowdsourcing, and data citation.
Dr. Davidson is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM Fellow, Corresponding Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, received the Lenore Rowe Williams Award, and was a Fulbright Scholar. She received the IEEE Technical Committee of Data Engineering Impact Award, the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women/Provost Award for her work on advancing women in engineering, and served as Chair of the board of the Computing Research Association.
Susan has been married to her husband, Charles Davidson, since 1978. She is the proud mother of sons Jeremy (with wife Sola and 2 year old daughter Sloan) and Christopher (with wife Katie and 2 year old daughter Penny). In her spare time, she loves to exercise, garden, bake and sew.
Stephanie Weirich
ENIAC President’s Distinguished Professor Computer and Information Science Penn Engineering
Stephanie Weirich graduated from Rice University in 1996 with a B.A. in Computer Science, and then received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2002. Since that time, she has been a faculty member at Penn and is currently the ENIAC President’s Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science.
Her research interests include programming language design, type systems, functional programming and verification. She was a co-founder of the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW), the conference chair of ICFP 2020, and the program chair for ESOP 2024, POPL 2019, and ICFP 2010. Dr. Weirich is an editor of the journals ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, TheoreTICS, and Logical Methods in Computer Science and is a past editor of the Journal of Functional Programming. Her awards include the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, a 2016 Microsoft Outstanding Collaborator award, and the 2016 Most Influential ICFP Paper award (for 2006).
Stephanie is married to Steve Zdancewic, also a professor in CIS at Penn and they have two daughters, Ellie and Sarah. Her hobbies include board games, reading and sewing.
Linh Phan
Associate Professor Computer and Information Science Penn Engineering
Linh Thi Xuan Phan received her B. Comp and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore in 2003 and in 2009, respectively. She joined the Penn faculty in 2012 and is currently an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science.
Her research interests include cyber-physical systems, distributed systems, real-time systems, and security. Phan has served as the Secretary-Treasurer of ACM SIGBED, as well as on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems and the Steering Committees for RTSS, RTAS, EMSOFT and RTNS. She is a recipient of Penn’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and an NSF CAREER award. She currently serves as the faculty Co-Director of the DATS Master’s program.
Thursday, April 27, 2023 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM Berger Auditorium | Skirkanich Hall | 210 S 33rd Street
Sponsored by: The Franklin Institute University of Pennsylvania, Department of Computer and Information Science, School of Engineering and Applied Science
Light Refreshments will be served | Zoom Access
Greetings:
Prof. Mitch Marcus and Dr. Darryl Williams, Senior VP for Science and Education, Franklin Institute
Talks:
ORDERRRR!!! State Machine Replication in the Age of Blockchains Prof. Lorenzo Alvisi, Cornell University
Atomicity in Argus and Beyond Prof. Maurice Herlihy, Brown University
Exceptions, Effects, and Abstraction Prof. Andrew Myers, Cornell University
Reflections on a Career in Computer Science Prof. Barbara Liskov, Laureate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Moderators:
Profs. Benjamin Pierce, Stephanie Weirich, and Steve Zdancewic
Grace Hopper
In support of Penn Engineering’s educational mission of promoting the role of all engineers in society, this series is intended to serve the dual purpose of recognizing successful women in engineering and of inspiring students to achieve at the highest level.
Grace Hopper is a wonderful example of a visionary in her field who exhibited the type of pioneering spirit that is an inspiration to all of us. This series provides another avenue for recognition of distinguished leaders in engineering and presents role models that help remind all of us why we chose this profession.
Hanna Hajishirzi
Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington and a Senior Director of NLP at AI2
“OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Modeling”
Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both AI research and commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the significance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including their biases and potential risks, I argue that it is essential for the research community to have access to powerful, truly open LMs. In this talk, I present our OLMo project aimed at building strong language models and making them fully accessible to researchers along with open-source code for data, training, and inference. I describe our efforts in building language modeling from scratch, expanding their scope to make them applicable and useful for real-world applications, and investigating a new generation of LMs that address fundamental challenges inherent in current models.
Meredith Ringel Morris
Director for Human-AI Interaction Research at Google DeepMind
“AGI is Coming… Is HCI Ready?”
We are at a transformational junction in computing, in the midst of an explosion in capabilities of foundational AI models that may soon match or exceed typical human abilities for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, a milestone often termed Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Achieving AGI (or even closely approaching it) will transform computing, with ramifications permeating through all aspects of society. This is a critical moment not only for Machine Learning research, but also for the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
In this talk, I will define what I mean (and what I do NOT mean) by “AGI” (and related concepts, like superintelligence), and my journey from AGI skeptic to believing we are within five years of reaching this milestone. I will then discuss how this new era of computing necessitates a new sociotechnical research agenda on methods and interfaces for studying and interacting with AGI. For instance, how can we extend status quo design and prototyping methods for envisioning novel experiences at the limits of our current imaginations? What novel interaction modalities might AGI (or superintelligence) enable (e.g., “ESP”)? How do we create interfaces for computing systems that may intentionally or unintentionally deceive an end-user? How do we bridge the “gulf of evaluation” when a system may arrive at an answer through methods that fundamentally differ from human mental models, or that may be too complex for an individual user to grasp? How do we evaluate technologies that may have unanticipated systemic side-effects on society when released into the wild?
I will close by reflecting on the relationship between HCI and AI research. Typically, HCI and other sociotechnical domains are not considered as core to the ML research community as areas like model building. However, I argue that research on Human-AI Interaction and the societal impacts of AI is vital and central to this moment in computing history. HCI must not become a “second class citizen” to AI, but rather be recognized as fundamental to ensuring the path to AGI and beyond is a beneficial one.
Katrina Ligett
Microsoft Visiting Professor, Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) and Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University
“Data Privacy is Important, But It’s Not Enough“
Our current data ecosystem leaves individuals, groups, and society vulnerable to a wide range of harms, ranging from privacy violations to subversion of autonomy to discrimination to erosion of trust in institutions. In this talk, I’ll discuss the Data Co-ops Project, a multi-institution, multi-disciplinary effort I co-lead with Kobbi Nissim. The Project seeks to organize our understanding of these harms and to coordinate a set of technical and legal approaches to addressing them. In particular, I’ll mention recent joint work with Ayelet Gordon and Alex Wood, wherein we argue that legal and technical tools aimed at controlling data and addressing privacy concerns are inherently insufficient for addressing the full range of these harms.
Magdalena Balazinska
Professor and Director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
”Video Data Management: From Data Models to Data Storage and Benchmarking” The proliferation of inexpensive high-quality cameras coupled with recent advances in machine learning and computer vision have enabled new applications on video data. This in turn has renewed interest in video data management systems. In this talk, we explore several challenges related to video data management. We start by discussing data models. How should we expose video data to make it queryable by applications? We look in particular at the case of 360-degree videos. Second, we explore components of video data storage. How can we store videos in a way that makes them efficiently queryable? Finally, we discuss the problem of benchmarking video data management systems.
Rebecca Mercuri
Founder of Notable Software, Inc
“A 2020 Vision of U.S. Election Security”
Despite the provision of a $380M federal grant to enhance technology and improve security in the 2018 midterm elections, machine failures and computer malfunctions again plagued polling places (in GA, PA, NY, IN, TX, and MA), resulting in late openings, long lines, and turned-away voters. Poor ballot layouts resurfaced in Florida, resulting in nearly 25,000 missed votes and the removal of the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, due to “misfeasance, incompetence and neglect of duty.” Many of the unauditable electronic voting machines are now being replaced with paper ballots and scanners, but creative State legislation (including in FL, MI and CA) and new tactics (such as risk-limiting audits) are increasingly being used to thwart and prohibit comprehensive recounts, even when results fall within the range of equipment error. This talk examines some of the shenanigans that we may be looking forward to seeing in 2020, sheds light on the reasons why contrived (and even avoidable) disenfranchisement continues to play a fundamental role in American Democracy, and offers some suggestions for improvement.
Shafi Goldwasser
“Pseudo Deterministic Algorithms and Proofs”
Abstract: Probabilistic algorithms for both decision and search problems can offer significant complexity improvements over deterministic algorithms. One major difference, however, is that they may output different solutions for different choices of randomness. This makes correctness amplification impossible for search algorithms and is less than desirable in setting where uniqueness of output is important such as generation of system wide cryptographic parameters or distributed setting where different sources of randomness are used. Pseudo-deterministic algorithms are a class of randomized search algorithms, which output a unique answer with high probability. Intuitively, they are indistinguishable from deterministic algorithms by an polynomial time observer of their input/output behavior. In this talk I will describe what is known about pseudo-deterministic algorithms in the sequential, sub-linear and parallel setting. We will also briefly describe an extension of pseudo-deterministic algorithms to interactive proofs for search problems where the veri fier is guaranteed with high probability to output the same output on different executions, regardless of the prover strategies. Based on Joint work with Gat, Goldreich, Ron, Grossman and Holden.
Bio: Shafi Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She is also a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Goldwasser pioneering contributions include the introduction of interactive proofs, zero knowledge protocols, hardness of approximation proofs for combinatorial problems, and multi-party secure protocols.She was the recipient of the ACM Turing Award for 2012, the Gödel Prize in 1993 and another in 2001, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award, the RSA award in mathematics, the ACM Athena award for women in computer science, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, and the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore award. She is a member of the AAAS, NAS and NAE.
Goldwasser received a BS degree in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979, and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984.
Cary Phillips
“Creating the Impossible: Hollywood Visual Effects at Industrial Light & Magic”
Abstract: When you watch a movie in a darkened theater, you imagine that the scenes on the screen actually unfolded in real life with a camera there to capture them. This is utterly false, it’s all fake. At Industrial Light & Magic, small armies of artists and engineers blend digital environments and CG characters with actors on live action sets to bring the impossible to life and blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Cary Phillips will share a light-hearted view behind the scenes of the visual effects of such movies as The Avengers, Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers, and Star Wars.
Bio: Cary co-leads the R&D group at ILM, where he has worked for over 20 years. He’s a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the recipient of three Academy Technical Achievement Awards. He earned his PhD in computer graphics from Penn in 1991.
Eric Horvitz Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director Microsoft Research
“Data, Predictions, and Decisions in Support of People and Society Web”
Abstract: I will present on harnessing data to build predictive models that can guide decision making. First, I will discuss opportunities to harness data in prediction and decision making in healthcare. I will focus on efforts on readmissions reduction and hospital-associated infection to highlight broader possibilities with using machine learning and decision support to enhance the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare. Then, I will describe the use of anonymized behavioral data drawn from web services as a large-scale sensor network for public health. I will describe several efforts, including the use of data from logs of web search to identify adverse effects of medications. Finally, I will discuss directions with building systems that are designed to leverage the complementary aspects of machine and human intelligence to assist people in daily life and to solve problems in science and society.
Bio: Eric Horvitz is distinguished scientist and director at Microsoft Research. His interests span theoretical and practical challenges with developing systems that perceive, learn, and reason, with a focus on inference and decision making under uncertainty. He has been elected a fellow of AAAI, AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering, and has been inducted into the CHI Academy. He received PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University.
John C. Mitchell Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Stanford University
“Javascript and Web Security: Isolation and Communication in the Programmable Web”
Abstract: The World Wide Web is our most important distributed computer system. In the modern web, pages seen by viewers contain executable programs from many sources, loaded into the browser in increasingly complex ways. This complexity is an important part of the advertising infrastructure, for example, allowing advertising companies to pass information between them and effectively auction off a portion of the user’s screen to the advertiser most interested in reaching that individual. Maps, games, and other apps are also served through sites that do not know what they do or how they work.
In this environment, it is important to allow web designers and site developers to write sophisticated programs that run in end-user browsers. At the same time, some programs may maliciously try to steal information, or worse. Therefore, separate programs from separate sources must be allowed to run, communicate with each other, but not carry out malicious attacks. Over the last several years, we have studied this problem and developed methods for isolating communicating JavaScript programs. Our methods prevent attacks we found on widely used commercial sites and are provably secure, using methods from the mathematical theory of programming languages. In addition, these approaches are relevant to mobile security, because approximately three-quarters of current Android apps use an embedded “browser” to interact with web sites.
Bio: John Mitchell is the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, and Vice Provost for Online Learning. His research in computer security focuses on cloud security, mobile and web security, privacy, and network security. He has also worked on programming language analysis and design, formal methods, and applications of mathematical logic to computer science. Prof. Mitchell currently leads research projects funded by the US Air Force, the Office of Naval Research, private companies and foundations; he is the Stanford Principal Investigator of the multidisciplinary TRUST NSF Science and Technology Center and Chief Computer Scientist of the DHHS-funded SHARPS project on healthcare security and privacy. He is a consultant and advisor to companies and the author of over 150 research articles and two books.
On October 22, 2012, the Department of Computer and Information Science hosted JoshiFest, a celebration and symposium to honor the work of Dr. Aravind K. Joshi, Henry Salvatori Professor Emeritus of Computer and Cognitive Science.
Fall 2012 marked Dr. Joshi’s fifty-second year on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. His extraordinary service to the University includes being a founding member of the graduate group in Computer and Information Science in the 1960s; co-founder of the Computer and Information Science (CIS) Department with Saul Gorn in 1972; and expanding the cognitive science research group into the Institute of Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) with faculty from computer science, linguistics, psychology and philosophy in 1991.
Additional honors and awards received by Dr. Joshi include the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science of the Franklin Institute in 2005; Cognitive Science Society David Rumelhart Prize in 2003; the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002; election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1999; election to Fellow of the ACM in 1998; Founding Fellow of AAAI in 1990; and election to IEEE Fellow in 1976.
Welcome 9:15 – 9:30: Susan Davidson
Session 1 9:30 – 10:45: Bonnie Webber, Chair
9:30 – 9:55 “Recollections” Rajeev Sangal, IIIT Hyderabad Video
9:55 – 10:20 “Aravind Joshi as Advisor” Kathleen McKeown, Columbia University Video
10:20 – 10:45 “John seems to be intelligent” OR “How I met Aravind Joshi” Tony Kroch, University of Pennsylvania Video
10:45- 11:15 am Coffee Break
Session 2 11:15 – 12:30: Mitch Marcus, Chair
11:15 – 11:40 “Complex Lexical Descriptions and Curriculum Learning: Some new opportunities” Srinivas Bangalore, ATT Research Video
11:40 – 12:05 “As simple as possible, but not simpler” Robert Frank, Yale University Video
12:05 – 12:30 “Mild Context-Sensitivity and Near Context-Freedom” Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh Video
12:30 – 1:45 pm Lunch
Session 3 1:45 – 3:00: Mark Liberman, Chair
1:45 – 2:10 “Did you feed the animals?” Julia Hirshberg, Columbia University Video
2:10 – 2:35 “Girl Meets Boy: Generating Language with Adjoining” Kevin Knight, ISI Video
2:35 – 3:00 “Distributional methods in language and language learning” Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania Video
3 – 3:30 pm Coffee Break
Session 4 3:30 – 4:45: Ani Nenkova, Chair
3:30 – 3:55 “Centering in Naturally Occurring Discourse” Marilyn Walker, UC Santa Cruz Video
3:55-4:20 “Locality” Scott Weinstein, University of Pennsylvania Video
4:30-4:45 “Centering recollections” Barbara Grosz, Harvard University Video
Encomia 4:45 – 5:15 Peter Buneman, Bonnie Dorr, Lauri Karttunen, Rao Kosaraju, Kathleen McCoy, Fernando Pereira, Dan Roth, Yves Schabes, Candy Sidner, Fei Xia Video
6:00 – 10:00 pm: Dinner at the Penn Museum, Lower Gallery Featured Speakers: Jerry Kaplan, Eduardo Glandt, Susan Davidson
Symposium Planning Committee:
Susan Davidson Mark Liberman Mitch Marcus Ani Nenkova Bonnie Webber Charles Yang
Event Committee:
Laura Fox Rita Powell
By Shyamala Joshi
Dear Aravind,
I spent time at IRCS in 1998-9 – a mere moment ago as you look back over your 52 years presiding at Penn!
I want to thank you for your help in arranging my visits when I was just finding my feet as an academic, and for discussions about discourse with Bonnie Webber and Matthew Stone which were always inspiring to me. I was struck by your gentle way of communicating, and by the way you paid equal heed to discourse structure and sentence syntax, and invariably displayed comprehensive knowledge about both.
I also want to thank you for the ample supply of free doughnuts at breakfast time at the IRCS reception desk. These may have been a somewhat less direct result of your leadership, but they made up a healthy portion of my nutritional requirements during my stay at Penn, and were certainly responsible for several scientific breakthroughs.
With all my best wishes and thanks,
Alistair Knott Department of Computer Science University of Otago, New Zealand
I am truly sorry that I can’t be in Philadelphia for JoshiFest. It’s no overstatement to say that my life was changed by my years as a graduate student in CIS at Penn–and that my years at Penn were heavily shaped by the advice and guidance you provided both directly and indirectly. Directly: I learned about AI and natural-language processing and cognitive science–and about how to do research–from your lectures and our meetings and the feedback you provided on papers and presentations. Indirectly: I also learned an enormous amount about academic life and about how to be a professor from watching you function as one so successfully. It’s a real privilege to be able to say that your were one of my professors. It’s always also been so much fun to catch up with you at conferences and professional meetings over the years. I wish you the very, very best, and thank you for all that you’ve done for me and for so many other former Penn students.
Sincerely, Martha Pollack
My time with you, when you were my dissertation advisor – error correcting codes – goes back to the late 1960’s. Writing my dissertation was a period of uncertainty and insecurity for me, as I am sure for many others. You gave me the encouragement that I needed in a warm and personable manner, and provided the right advice at all the right places.
I believe that I saw you again when I came through Philadelphia in the 1970’s, but not since. Nor have I been acquainted with your later work. I can see from your CV, by what others write about you and by awards and accomplishments that you have had a brilliant career. Wonderful. Congratulations.
I can also see that it hasn’t included error-correction codes. I taught and researched in that field and in information theory, mostly in Denmark, where I have now lived for many years. I dropped the academic life a long time ago and have gone in other directions, a satisfying part being work in international cooperation and standardization in telecommunications. Since retiring I have gone back to studying, this time at Copenhagen University in the Humanities.
I have thought often how much your encouragement at the right time was formative for me, especially for my self-confidence. When I was putting the last touches on my dissertation, several articles unknown to you and me were published, completely covering what I had done. You helped me through that difficult period, getting my dissertation approved; and again in helping my self-confidence, pointing out that the articles were by some of the best people in the field.
I regret that I didn’t study something closer to your main interests, which might have given me a different kind of inspiration. I remember you though personally more than academically, as I was not acquainted with your body of work. And my memories are absolutely the very fondest.
All the best in the future to you and your family, Mark Ballan
I am truly sorry I will miss this special occasion.
You and Joe Bordogna are my oldest friends at UPENN and I have fondest memories of our lives together.
You supported me when life was difficult when we just begun our journey. You gave me wisdom, not to rush when inappropriate which I had some tendencies to do so.
We both can be proud of what has been accomplished at Penn. Your leadership made the difference.
With much Love and affection, Ruzena Bajcsy
I am sorry that I can not join everyone in celebrating your professional accomplishments to date. (I know that you are still accomplishing — you should think of this as your mid-semester feedback!). I enjoyed my years at Penn and learned a lot from you. Your devotion to your students, work, department and university were inspirational as was your skill in serving as the CIS chair for most of the time I was there. I count you as one of my important role models.
Tim Finin
I was very, very lucky to be present as you (and Bonnie, of course) brought first DLTAG, and then the PDTB, into existence. You were a wonder, Aravind. A thought machine. Like much young linguistic theory, these were heady ideas, hard to pin down, yet you worked diligently at it. You brought in funding, and good people, and kept our nose to the grindstone. Thank you for welcoming me as part of that early team. I wish you the very best for the years to come.
Kate Forbes-Riley
I wish I could be with you for this celebration. But it’s my day to be in class with my graduate students and I mustn’t leave them in the lurch.
However, though I can’t be there, I want you to know how much you mean to me. I still remember, in vivid detail while other memories fade with age, the first time I met you, sitting so peacefully by a flagrantly fake log fire in southern California, before some conference or other. To bracket that, years later, we had a very happy Spanish dinner in New York after the CUNY Conference just a few weeks ago.
In the years in between, my students and I have been blown away by your brilliance, the cleverness of your solutions to unsolvable linguistic problems.
I am happy – and privileged – to have known you.
With love, and congratulations, Janet Fodor
I will not be able to attend JoshiFest and to celebrate your outstanding achievements. I’ll be traveling. But I’ll be there in spirit.
It’s been wonderful knowing you these many years. I look forward to many more.
I wish you the very best.
Gerry (Gerald Prince)
Dear Professor Joshi,
Twenty-two years ago you kindly gave me the opportunity to discover, as a Post Doctorate, both Natural Language Processing and the research environment you had created at LINC Lab.
Since, I made the field mine and I keep very fond memories of the people I met there. I particularly appreciated the open and friendly environment of 3401 facilities, which conjugated with the high-level research that is the trademark of the place, made working there, a very enriching experience.
For all this I am grateful to you and will always be in your debt. Up to the last minute I entertained the thought that I could make it and be able to attend the JoshiFest event, but reality caught up and all I can do is contribute this few lines.
With all my best wishes and thanks. Patrick Paroubek LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Dear Prof. Aravind Joshi,
I am very much sorry that I can’t be with you on this special occasion JoshiFest.
It goes back to 1982 when you kindly invited me and offered an opportunity to spend one-year postdoc at UPenn. Without meeting you, it was impossible for me to lead such a fulfilling life I have currently been enjoying … you are the great mentor for my life who initiated my research career.
The best of health to you. –Takashi Yokomori
Wishing you all the very best for the JoshiFest and sorry that I am unable to attend to celebrate in person. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet with you. I thoroughly enjoyed our various discussions on multiwords and compositionality and our subsequent collaboration with Sriram Venkatapathy. I hope that our paths cross again sometime in the future.
With best wishes Diana McCarthy
Thank you very much for your strong and continued support for matters foundational over the many years. My very best wishes on this exceptional occasion!
Kind regards, Andre Scedrov
Congratulations on the symposium and celebration in your honor on October 22, 2012. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend, as I have commitments on that date.
I have admired your brilliant career for many years. Your work in computational linguistics and natural language processing has placed you among the world leading researchers in this field. I am pleased that your work has been recognized by the 1997 IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the 2003 Rumelhart Prize, and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. These three awards are impressive and well-deserved.
On a personal level, you are a warm human being with whom I always enjoyed meeting and speaking. I recall the support that you gave for scientific freedom and human rights by suggesting that refusenik computer scientists from the then Soviet Union be invited to an IJCAI conference. I quote from an e-mail message in my files of June 22, 1985 to Alan Mackworth, who was the IJCAI 1985 Conference Chair, with a cc: to you, who was the Program Chair, in which I wrote:
“Aravind Joshi has suggested that IJCAI would be willing to invite several Soviet computer scientists to be their guests at the forthcoming conference. He has suggested that I send you the names and addresses of several computer scientists in the area of artificial intelligence so that you may send them official invitations.
I believe that this is a most generous act on the part of IJCAI. It will only serve to help the scientists as it will demonstrate that they are known to others. Of course, there is no hope that they will be permitted to attend. If they are permitted to attend, and IJCAI believes that the free entry is too expensive, I will assure that their fees are paid.”
You may recall that the individuals I recommended and supplied their addresses were, Eugene Grechanovsky, Haim Kilov, Grigory Minc, Victor Kipnis, Alexander Lerner, Grigory and Isai Goldshtein, and Anatoly Shcharansky. Alan followed through and invited them. Lerner immigrated to Israel after being a refusenik for 17 years and is now deceased. The others are either in Israel or in the U.S. Without your initiative, they would never have been invited to IJCAI. Although they were unable to attend, they were comforted that their colleagues did not forget them.
Best wishes for a wonderful symposium to an outstanding computer scientist and a humanitarian. It has been an honor to have had you as a valued friend.
Jack Minker, Professor Emeritus University of Maryland October 15, 2012
Thanks for teaching me so much over the years – when we were colleagues at Penn, when we were at conferences together, or when we were just exchanging email. I really wish I could be there for the celebration (You know I hate to miss a party :-)), but you’ll have to party on without me, I’m afraid.
Your friend, Ivan (Ivan Sag)
I spent two wonderful years at IRCS from 1996 to 1998 as a visiting scientist. Those were very exciting years at Penn and in computational linguistics and IRCS was a fantastic place to be: the XTAG project, the statistical NLP reading group, the psycholinguistics research. We were starting to make sense of statistical and probabilistic approaches, and of their relation to richly lexicalised formalisms like TAGs and to cognitive science.
You were my host at IRCS and became my role-model: I have learnt from you the value intellectual inclusiveness. For all these years, I have admired your creativity and the profound elegance of your scientific results.
I feel privileged to be part of the scientific and intellectual world that you have been so fundamental in creating.
My best wishes, Paola Merlo University of Geneva
I have fond memories of the academic year ’77-’78, when I was introduced to the delights of Philadelphia (and particularly the Moore School), the delights of computer science and linguistics (particularly centered logic and topic/focus), and the delights of Indian cuisine (particularly puri). I greatly regret having had so little chance to indulge these delights with you in the years since then, but I am still hopeful that I may get the chance to do so on Monday and in the future.
Congratulations on a wonderful career and all best wishes.
Best, Steve Kuhn Department of Philosophy Georgetown University
Appa and The Infamous Green Board by Meera Joshi
Dear Dr. Joshi,
I wish I could attend what I know will be a beautiful event in your honor, so that I could shake your hand in person, see your smile, and hear all the wonderful things that people will say about what you’ve meant to them and the impact you’ve had on their lives. I would also love to say thank you to you in person: thank you for being a role model of intellectual integrity, creative and independent thinking; thank you for creating intellectual environments which feel welcoming and inclusive, where everyone is valued and appreciated; thank you for your calm, humble and dignified demeanor, which inspires peace of mind and enables clear thinking. More generally, thank you for being a kind, sweet person and a truly inspiring scholar!
My very best wishes, Raffaella Zanuttini
Dearest Aravind,
I am so sorry that I could not be in Philly today for this event, because I have very heavy teaching assignments this semester. Anyway, I want to send you this note of appreciation for your work.
I have always admired your scientific achievements and your career, and I share the love you have for mathematics of language. With your own results, you have started several new areas of investigation in this field. Furthermore, you have succeeded in giving broad visibility to mathematics of language into the fields of theoretical computer science and cognitive science as well. Without your work, most of the problems that people in mathematics of language work on nowadays would not be so well-known and appreciated in neighbour fields, and things for our community would be much more difficult.
I really want to add to the above a more personal note. I love so much computational linguistics and I really enjoy doing scientific research in mathematics of language. But if it weren’t for you, today I would not be a computational linguist, an most probably my life would not be so enjoyable to me. This is because the years I have spent at University of Pennsylvania, under your guidance and working with your collaborators, have been a real turning point in my career. Your invitation to come to University of Pennsylvania came at a time in which I was missing inspiration in my work, I was no longer confident I was the right person to do scientific research in mathematics of language, and I was almost on the verge of giving up. During the years at University of Pennsylvania and under your guidance, I learned a lot and gained self-confidence on my own ideas, and afterward everything worked out just perfectly in my scientific career. So I really have to say that you have changed my life !!
With real appreciation and with my best wishes,
Giorgio Satta Department of Information Engineering University of Padua
I’m so sorry I can’t be there in person to celebrate with you. This day comes right in between a talk in Germany and an invited talk at a Swedish conference that have both been scheduled for more than a year, so it just isn’t possible.
You have been my guiding light and my lodestone for most of my career, certainly since 1981. First, thank you for shepherding me safely through the final PhD days at Edinburgh and for the Sloan Fellowship at Penn. I will always treasure the time I was able to spend with you and the Tree Adjoining Grammar group at IRCS. There were so many interesting questions and issues being discussed, with never any shying away from the hard ones. So much to learn and to think about it – it was truly a mind-expanding experience, and in superb company. You have always surrounded yourself with the best and the brightest, and created a warm, collegial atmosphere for everyone around you. Those dinners at your house, with Susan’s wonderful Indian dishes and all of the friendly folks, are some of my best memories of Philadelphia.
You taught me how to do science, how to study language, and how to run a research group, or rather, how to let a research group run itself, :-). You are my model for what it means to be a scientist, a professor and a decent human being.
In lieu of my presence, please accept this poem along with my regrets:
There once was a young man from Pune With all of the grit of a puma With courage and grace he started his race And cruised past the rest like a schooner!
To Penn Engineering he came, Lured by news of ENIAC fame. He conquered with ease All theories made of trees, So massive the size of his brain.
His skill with automata grew, Mildly context sensitive, too. Yet no theorem or proof, Could keep him aloof, From a lass with eyes of deep blue
From Princeton to Penn he sojourned, With theories of computation adorned. His scientist Susan beside him, Saul Gorn’s wit to guide him, And lo, CIS was borned!
He proved a superb gardener to be, Adjoining branches to most every tree. His babies were thriving, His many students surviving, And sprouting like weeds, new faculty.
Now the awards and the accolades abound. From IJCAI, ACL, & CogSci they mound. For advances very big, In not just syntax, you twig, But also discourse and meaning, are found.
To Joshi-fest day we have bade him, For Yoda himself we’d not trade him. Our teacher so wise, Our friend in any guise, A mentor beloved we’ve made him.
Martha Palmer
Aravind,
Nothing can match those first mentoring moments when you and I first met. Sometime early 80-something-ish, in the cobwebs of the past, when I was a mere undergrad, you met me in Philadelphia and encouraged me to go to graduate school in computational linguistics. The discussions we had that day had a major impact on me, and paved the way toward a much broader understanding of the field than I had experienced in the narrow confines of my “Bostonian upbringing”. 🙂
And soon I learned just what a tremendous impact you had on so many people in the field. Everyone knows you are an academic parent, grand-parent, great-grandparent, and so on…your academic family is massive. But it extends far beyond that! Your mentoring is a treasured gift, bestowed upon a grand number of researchers who were lucky enough to learn from you, as I was, early in their careers. I have never seen a net cast so widely in any field of our size. Many of these people wouldn’t have been where they are, without your guidance.
Thank you, Aravind, for the incredibly positive impact you’ve had on me and many of my colleagues over these many years. You are a true inspiration, and I’m honored to attend this very special, and well-deserved event in honor of the king of our field!
Bonnie J. Dorr Department of Computer Science, UMIACS University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742
I am not going to be able to be in Philadelphia for the Joshi Fest, but I do want to join all the others in spirit in celebrating your varied accomplishments over the years. On a personal note, I am much appreciative for your help and mentorship while I was a graduate student at Penn and for your looking out for me even after I decided to work in a different area from yours and with another advisor.
Sincerely, Gopalan Nadathur
I welcome the chance to thank you again for your support and inspiration while I was at Penn, and I regret being unable to attend JoshiFest. I’d love to share in the celebration of your research and of all your profound impacts on the natural language research culture at Penn.
Best Wishes,
Sharon Cote
Let me take the occasion to express both my great admiration for all that you’ve done and my deepest fondness and warmth towards you as a person. Your gentle wisdom shines through everything you do, and has been a great part of what has built Penn into such a wonderful place. I wish you all the best!
I enclose a couple of nice photos from the conference in Batumi, Georgia in 2005.
Excursion from Batumi, Georgia, September 2005
Volodja and Barbara and Susan and Aravind, excursion from Batumi, September 2005
With the greatest affection and regard, Barbara Partee
I am deeply sorry that I can’t be there in Philadelphia for this very special occasion.
Please accept my congratulations on all your wonderful achievements that are truly worth celebrating! I wish the very best for you and your family.
Regards, Rashmi Prasad
Dear Aravind
I am sorry not being able to attend.
When I arrived at Penn in 1987, I had a very vague idea about what my future life would be. With you, I discovered what it meant to be a researcher, and that is what I decided to be. You were always so open minded and eager to learn and discover, always generous in time and ideas, even with young starting students.
You’ve always been a source of inspiration and a model for me, both as a scientist and as a human being, I wish you a happy and successful party, and deeply regret not to be there.
Anne Abeillé University Paris Diderot
Taking your graduate seminar (ca. 1984) opened my eyes to the ways grammars and parsing could be applied to molecular biology. That’s been the basis of my life’s work, so in a very real sense you’ve been a great influence as well as an inspiration to me. Much later, I was delighted when you and several of your wonderful students turned your efforts in that direction, helping to clarify the grammar formalisms relevant to biological structure and (with Ken Dill) demonstrating the relationships between parsing and the thermodynamics of macromolecular folding.
Thanks for what you’ve contributed to my field (but a small fraction of your oeuvre), and much more than that, thanks for your very significant part in setting me on this path.
All the best, David Searls
So sorry to be away from campus for your celebration. When I came to Penn 25 years ago, one attraction was IRCS. Your leadership of the Institute (together with others, of course) ensured that it was a truly interdisciplinary endeavor, including not only language studies but also perception and action. My students and I greatly benefited from the IRCS that you were so instrumental in guiding.
With all best wishes, Gary Hatfield
We are very sorry that we won’t be able to attend the festivities this week. Many congratulations and well-wishes for you and your family!
William and Karin Schuler
It was really at IRCS that I was first exposed to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. I was a graduate student then from the nearby University of Delaware who found the academic environment at IRCS really attractive, and you, of course, initiated and led this excellent academic and research center. Later on after I graduated I became a postdoc and spent a few more years there. I was able to listen to your talks and attend your project meetings. Over the years after I left Penn, I had the good fortune of meeting and interacting with you at workshops and conferences every now and then. If I can only say one thing about those experiences, it is that you always made sense whenever you talked. I hope to meet you at conferences and workshops and benefit even more from your wisdom.
Congratulations to your achievements and have a wonderful party!
Nianwen Xue Brandeis University
I wish I could be there in person to join your many other admirers and friends in celebrating your accomplishments along with your friendship. It’s hard to believe almost half a century has passed since we met! I’ve savored many fruitful intellectual and social interactions through this period, and I look forward to more in the future.
Warm regards,
Stanley Peters Stanford University
I am so sorry that I missed JoshiFest. You are the one who made it possible for me to come to Penn, and your guidance and wisdom will always be dear to me. You made IRCS the place it is – a place for enthusiastic people to come together and do cool and interesting things. During my time in Philadelphia, I was always amazed at how even small conversations with you could lead to great insight, and how you made time for meetings with students like me.
Thank you, and all the best for you and yours. Tatjana Scheffler.
When I started graduate studies at Penn, I was generally interested in artificial intelligence and language, but not so interested that I was committed to a PhD. It was during my second year that you offered me the opportunity to work with you. An IJCAI paper appeared the following summer, and I committed to getting a PhD.
Your intellectual accomplishments have been amazing: a class of grammars that was totally unique and attracted so many researchers over the years, centering, which continues to influence the field, the discourse Treebank which is likely to spur algorithm research in discourse for years to come, and a broad spectrum of other topics. Of course, your willingness to work with others throughout meant that you touched many, many individuals, both students and mature researchers.
No less significant is the leadership you provided in building first rate academic institutions. Your 14 years serving as department head of computer science at Penn is reflected in the growth in quality (and quantity) of the faculty and program there. From obtaining Sloan Foundation funds for cognitive science and the founding of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, your contributions in creating a first class research and teaching organization are abundantly clear.
It has been a privilege to know you and work with you.
My highest regards and best wishes go with you, Ralph Weischedel
