Kathleen McKeown facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Kathleen McKeown
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| Institutions | Columbia University |
| Thesis | Generating natural language text in response to questions about database structure (1982) |
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Kathleen R. McKeown is an American computer scientist. She is an expert in a field called natural language processing. This field teaches computers to understand and use human language. She works at Columbia University as a professor. She also helped start the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering there.
Kathleen McKeown earned her first degree from Brown University in 1976. She then got her PhD in Computer Science in 1982 from the University of Pennsylvania. After that, she began her career at Columbia University. She made history there by becoming the first woman to be a tenured professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She was also the first woman to lead the Computer Science Department, from 1998 to 2003.
Leading in Computer Science
Professor McKeown has held important leadership roles in the world of computer science. She was the President, Vice President, and Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This group focuses on how computers and language work together. She also served on the board of the Computing Research Association.
How Computers Understand Language
Professor McKeown's main research area is natural language processing. She works on making computers better at understanding and creating human language. One of her big projects was called Newsblaster. This program could read many news stories from different websites. Then, it would create a short summary of the news. For some years, Newsblaster could even summarize news in different languages.
Awards and Recognitions
Kathleen McKeown has received many awards for her work. These awards show how important her contributions are to computer science.
- 1985 Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation
- 1991 Faculty Award for Women from the National Science Foundation
- 1994 Named a Fellow of the AAAI
- 2003 Named a Fellow of the ACM
- 2010 Received the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Innovation
- 2012 Named a founding Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- 2019 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 2022 Elected to the American Philosophical Society
