Regina Barzilay facts for kids

Regina Barzilay (born 1970) is a computer scientist from Israel and the United States. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She also leads the artificial intelligence (AI) work at the MIT Jameel Clinic.

Her main research areas are natural language processing (NLP) and using deep learning for chemistry and health. NLP helps computers understand human language. Deep learning is a type of AI that learns from lots of data.

Early Life and Education

Regina Barzilay was born in Chișinău, Moldova, in 1970. When she was 20, she moved to Israel with her family.

She studied at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. There, she earned her first two degrees in 1993 and 1998. Later, she got her PhD in computer science from Columbia University in 2003. Her research focused on how computers can understand and summarize information.

Career and Research

After finishing her PhD, Dr. Barzilay worked as a researcher at Cornell University. In 2016, she became a professor at MIT. She teaches about electrical engineering and computer science.

Her own experience with breast cancer inspired her to use her skills to help others. She started doing research in oncology, which is the study of cancer.

Understanding Language

For her PhD, Dr. Barzilay helped create a program called Newsblaster. This program could read news stories from many different places. It would then figure out if they were about the same topic. Finally, it would create a summary of the news.

She also developed computer programs to help understand languages that don't have many learning materials. These programs could learn from common languages like English. This helped analyze less common languages.

AI for Health

Dr. Barzilay now uses machine learning to help with cancer research. Machine learning is a type of AI where computers learn from data. She works with doctors and students to create special computer models.

These models use images, text, and other data to find patterns. These patterns can help with finding diseases early. They can also help with treatment and preventing illnesses.

MIT Jameel Clinic

In 2018, Dr. Barzilay became the AI lead at the new MIT Jameel Clinic. This center focuses on using AI in health sciences. They work on finding diseases, discovering new medicines, and making medical devices.

In 2020, she was part of a team that made an important discovery. With Professor James J. Collins, they found a new antibiotic called halicin. This was the first new antibiotic found in 30 years.

Halicin can kill many strong bacteria. This includes bacteria that are resistant to other medicines. It can fight serious infections like tuberculosis and C. difficile.

Awards and Recognition

In 2017, Regina Barzilay received the MacArthur Fellowship. This award is sometimes called the "Genius Grant." She won it for creating ways for computers to understand and analyze huge amounts of human language.

She has also won many other awards. These include the NSF Career Award and the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award. She also received a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship.

Her teaching at MIT has also been recognized. She won the Jamieson Teaching Award in 2016. In 2018, she was named an AAAI Fellow by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

In 2020, she was the first person to receive the $1 million AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. In 2023, she was chosen to be a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.