« Dr. Barbara Tobias and Dr. Nancy Elder, University of Cincinnati, and Amber Lucero-Criswell, Cincinnati Art Museum — The Art of Observation, 6/7/06 | Main | Dr. Arthur Daemmrich, Director, Center for Contemporary History and Policy, Chemical Heritage Foundation, 6/14/06 »
June 09, 2006
Dr. Kevin Knight, Senior Research Scientist and Fellow, Information Sciences Institute, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, 5/24/06
Dr. Kevin Knight is Senior Research Scientist and Fellow, Information Sciences Institute, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and Research Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California. Dr. Knight was a major force in reorienting the field of natural language processing toward the pervasive use of statistical learning over large corpora, and in the process revolutionized the practice of Machine Translation. He is now widely regarded as a world leader in statistical natural language processing, with significant contributions across a wide range of topics, including efficient decoding algorithms, incorporating syntactic knowledge into statistical translation models, natural language generation, machine transliteration, and knowledge representation.
Dr. Knight has also made a significant impact through co-authoring one of the definitive general textbooks on Artificial Intelligence (with Dr. Elaine Rich) and through his role in developing publicly available software for statistical machine translation (GIZA). A recent survey article in Scientific American identified Language Weaver, the startup company Dr. Knight launched wtih ISI colleague Dr. Daniel Marcu, as the standout in the field of machine translation, and identified Dr. Knight as “the pioneer in statistical translation”. He notes the state of the machine translation art still falls far short of a longtime goal first enunciated in 1957 by Noam Chomsky — the creation of an algorithm that would be able to judge whether a given string of words made up a grammatical English sentence.
Dr. Knight received his B.A. in computer science from Harvard University (1986) and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (1992). He has served on the Editorial Boards of Computational Linguistics and Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
Posted by David Lemberg at June 9, 2006 03:48 PM Return to SCIENCE AND SOCIETY home page