Heng Ji facts for kids

Heng Ji is a brilliant computer scientist. She helps computers understand and use information from text. Her work focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP). This field teaches computers to "read" and "understand" human language.

She is famous for her work on Information Extraction. This means teaching computers to pull out important facts from large amounts of text. For example, finding names, places, or events. Since 2010, she has helped lead a big project called the NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task. This project helps computers build huge databases of facts.

Heng Ji has received many awards for her amazing work. In 2013, she was named one of "AI's 10 to Watch" by IEEE Intelligent Systems. She also won awards from the NSF in 2009, Google in 2009 and 2014, and IBM Watson in 2012.

Education and Learning

Heng Ji started her journey in China. She earned her first two degrees from Tsinghua University. There, she studied Computational Linguistics. This field combines computer science with the study of language.

Later, she moved to the United States. She earned two more degrees in Computer Science from New York University. She completed her PhD in 2008. Her main teacher was Ralph Grishman. Her PhD research was about making information extraction even better. She focused on how different parts of this process can work together.

Her Career Journey

After finishing her PhD, Dr. Ji became a professor. She started teaching at Queens College, City University of New York. There, she created a special research group called the BLENDER Lab. This lab works on finding information across different languages, documents, and types of media.

In 2013, she joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She became a tenured associate professor there. This means she earned a permanent teaching position. Since 2019, she has been a full professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She also works as an Amazon Scholar.

What She Researches

Heng Ji is a top researcher in several exciting areas. These include Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Information Extraction. Machine learning is about teaching computers to learn from data without being directly programmed.

She has written over 300 research papers. These papers are published in important Computer Science conferences. Some of these include the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and The Web Conference.

Dr. Ji is a leader in making computers smarter about language. She helps them understand events by looking at information from many different sources.

Awards and Recognitions

Heng Ji has received many honors for her contributions to computer science:

• 2009 NSF Career Award
• 2009 Google Research Award
• 2012 IBM Watson Faculty Award
• 2013 IEEE AI's 10 to Watch
• 2014 Google Research Award
• 2016 World Economic Forum, 'Young Scientist'
• 2017 World Economic Forum, 'Young Scientist'
• 2020 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, best demonstration paper