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Chris Callison-Burch is the Raj and Neera Singh Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research is in natural language processing. His group currently works on using large language models to verify scientific claims, on measuring bias and framing in news coverage at scale, and on synthetic data for training and evaluating open models. He is the principal investigator of the DARPA SciFy program at Penn and co-chairs the Human-AI Symbiosis working group of the NSF AI Institute for Human-AI Cooperation. His work has also been funded by IARPA and by faculty research awards from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Roblox. He was a visiting research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in 2023 and 2024.

He teaches Penn’s Artificial Intelligence course, which enrolled more than 600 students across its on-campus and online sections in Fall 2025. In 2026 he received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the university’s highest teaching honor, following the Lutron Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching and Advising and two Ford Motor Company Awards for Faculty Advising.

Fifteen PhD students have graduated from his lab. They hold faculty positions at Brown, Carnegie Mellon, and Drexel, research positions at Google, Amazon, Bloomberg, and the Johns Hopkins Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, and have founded several companies.

He has published more than 250 papers, which have been cited over 40,000 times. He is a Sloan Research Fellow, served as General Chair of ACL 2017 and Program Co-Chair of EMNLP 2015, and was the ACL’s Sponsorship Director from 2020 to 2025. In 2023 he testified before Congress on generative AI and copyright law.

Recent Papers

  1. The Media Bias Detector: A Framework for Annotating and Analyzing the News. Samar Haider, Amir Tohidi, Jenny S. Wang, Timothy Dörr, David M. Rothschild, Chris Callison-Burch, Duncan J. Watts. Science Advances, 2026.
  2. Building Auditable AI Text Detectors with Sparse Autoencoders. Liam Dugan, Callum Stuart McDougall, Matthew Denton, Phillip Pham, Christine Kaeser-Chen, Chris Callison-Burch. EMNLP, 2026.
  3. Autorubric: A Unifying Framework for Rubric-Based LLM Evaluation on Non-Verifiable Tasks. Delip Rao, Chris Callison-Burch. COLM, 2026.
  4. FineInstructions: Scaling Synthetic Instructions to Pre-Training Scale. Ajay Patel, Colin Raffel, Chris Callison-Burch. COLM, 2026.
  5. Scaling Text-Rich Image Understanding via Code-Guided Synthetic Multimodal Data Generation. Yue Yang, Ajay Patel, Matt Deitke, Tanmay Gupta, Luca Weihs, et al.. ACL, 2025. Senior Area Chair highlight award at ACL 2025

Recent Press

  1. Observer."As A.I. Majors Grow, Universities Race to Keep Curricula Relevant" by Eric Berger. August 18, 2026
  2. ABC 6 Action News WPVI-TV Philadelphia."Study examines AI chat bot bias, how it responds to prompts" by Christie Ileto. July 23, 2026
  3. Communications of the ACM."Can AI Detectors Be Trusted?" by Samuel Greengard. June 23, 2026
  4. ABC 6 Action News WPVI-TV Philadelphia."Living with AI: How artificial intelligence could impact the job market" by Christie Ileto. March 5, 2026
  5. The Christian Science Monitor."I trusted AI with daily decisions. The way it dived in, experts say, raises flags." by Caitlin Babcock. March 3, 2026

Recent Talks

  1. Keynote at the 2026 Delaware Data Science Symposium, University of Delaware. The Promises (and Pitfalls) of AI for Data Science and Other Sciences. October 8, 2026
  2. 25th Annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The Rise and Reckoning of AI. March 17, 2026
  3. The 2026 University of Pennsylvania MLK Symposium. AI and the Dream. January 28, 2026
  4. JHU AITC Conference on Large Language Models and Large Foundational Models. A Brief History, But Long Impact of LLMs. November 20, 2025
  5. Perry World House conference on The Future of Artificial Intelligence Governance and International Politics. Panel on AI, Chips, and U.S.-China Competition. October 7, 2025
Email: ccb@upenn.edu
Office: AGH 420
Office Hours: Wednesdays 3:30-5pm in AGH 431 (Fall 2026)