University of Colorado Boulder Associate Professor Daniel Jurafsky
has been named a 2002 winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly
known as the "genius grant."
Jurafsky, an associate professor of linguistics and computer science,
is the sixth CU-Boulder faculty member to win the prestigious award
from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago.
Jurafsky, 39, was one of 24 recipients of the 2002 "no-strings
attached" funding. He will receive $500,000.
"I am very honored to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, which I see as
recognition of the work of an entire lab here at CU-Boulder," Jurafsky
said.
The MacArthur Program selection committee cited Jurafsky for his work
establishing "the foundations for developing systems that use natural
language to interact with people." Jurafsky's research is in the field
of computational linguistics.
His work focuses on using computers to model how people use language,
and getting computers to understand humans. Much of his research has
been on identifying patterns in syntax that provide clues to the
underlying semantic structure of communication.
"Jurafsky's basic research directly enhances the engineering of
human-machine natural language systems," concluded the committee.
"For the third consecutive year I am honored to congratulate a Boulder
faculty member, this time Associate Professor Jurafsky, who has been
named to the prestigious group of MacArthur Fellows,"
said Chancellor Richard L. Byyny.
"It is particularly exciting to see a young faculty
member receive this honor, and especially one whose research combines
the highly technical field of computer science with the more humanistic
study of linguistics in the development of human language systems for
modern technology."
"I am honored to recognize this high achievement by Professor
Jurafsky," he said.
Jurafsky is the sixth CU-Boulder faculty member to have won a MacArthur
Fellowship since the program was begun in 1981. Past winners include
David Hawkins of philosophy in 1981,
Charles Archambeau of physics in 1988,
Patricia (Patty) Limerick of history in 1995,
Margaret Murnane of physics in 2000 and
Norman Pace of molecular, cellular and developmental biology
in 2001.
"Dan is an extraordinary person," said linguistics Chair Barbara Fox.
"Not only is he a brilliant and creative thinker, but he is a kind,
generous and giving human being. We are immensely proud of him, and we
are extremely fortunate to have him in our community."
Jurafsky received his bachelor's degree and his doctorate from the
University of California at Berkeley. He has been a faculty member in
the linguistics department at CU-Boulder since 1996.
His research has been published in journals such as Computational
Linguistics and Cognitive Science. His most recent book, co-authored
with CU-Boulder computer science Professor James Martin, and titled
"Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language
Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition," is a
highly regarded textbook about computational linguistics.
Jurafsky's current research, in collaboration with Research Professor
Wayne Ward at CU-Boulder's Center for Spoken Language Research, focuses
on broadening computer speech recognition systems to better recognize
people with strong foreign accents. He also is working on developing
computer programs for the Web that will allow people to type questions
and receive answers directly from the Web.
