7/21/2016 By Liz Ahlberg, University of Illinois News Bureau
Written by By Liz Ahlberg, University of Illinois News Bureau
CS Professor Dan Roth was one of six University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty members have been elected 2014 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The other recipients were Placid M. Ferreira (Mechanical Science and Engineering), Brendan A. Harley (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering), Joseph W. Lyding (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Phillip A. Newmark (Cell and Developmental Biology), and William H. Sanders (Electrical and Computer Engineering).
The Illinois researchers are among the 401 new fellows chosen for their efforts to advance science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. The new fellows will be honored at the AAAS annual meeting in February 2015.
“These are extraordinary faculty members who are making great contributions in their fields. They are innovators and educators who are committed to addressing the grand challenges of our society. They are prime examples of the scholarship, ingenuity and quality teaching that are Illinois hallmarks,” said Ilesanmi Adesida, the vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost of the Urbana-Champaign campus.
Roth was honored for distinguished contributions to the field of computer science and engineering, particularly for innovations in machine learning. His research focuses on machine learning methods for natural language understanding, or helping computers to understand language to better interact with humans.
Roth earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1995 and joined the faculty at Illinois in 1997. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computing Machinery, and received an NSF CAREER award. He also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute at Illinois.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, was founded in 1848. Fellows are chosen for their outstanding contributions to the field, a tradition since 1874.