Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE (

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

, July 21, 1948) is an American computer scientist and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and

multi-agent system A multi-agent system (MAS or "self-organized system") is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents.Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Jang, I.; Arvin, F.; Lanzon, A.,A Decentralized Cluster Formation Containment Framework f ...

s. With Alison Simmons, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS programme at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses. Grosz was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

in 2008 for pioneering research in natural language communication between humans and computers and its application to human-computer interaction.

Education

Grosz earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

in 1969, and master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

in 1971 and 1977, respectively.

Career

Grosz established and led interdisciplinary institutions, and advanced the role of women in science. From 2007 to 2011 Grosz served as interim dean and then dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and from 2001 to 2007 she was the Institute's first dean of science, designing and building its science program. She currently serves on the Science Board and Science Steering Committee at the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...

. She is responsible for Harvard being one of the first universities to integrate philosophy across different computer science courses.

Memberships and awards

Grosz is a member of the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

(2003), the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

(2004), and the

(2008). She is a fellow of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

(AAAI) (1990), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2004). In 1993, she became the first woman president of the AAAI. She serves on the executive committee and is a former trustee of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and serves on the council of the American Philosophical Society. In 2008, she received the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award for "fundamental contributions to research in natural language processing and in multi-agent systems, for her leadership in the field of artificial intelligence, and for her role in the establishment and leadership of interdisciplinary institutions". In 2014 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2015, she received the

IJCAI Award for Research Excellence The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is a biannual award before given at the IJCAI conference to researcher in artificial intelligence as a recognition of excellence of their career. Beginning in 2016, the conference is held annually and so is ...

for her pioneering research in Natural Language Processing and in theories and applications of Multiagent Collaboration. In 2017, she received the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proces ...

Life Time Achievement Award.

Research

Grosz specializes in natural language processing and

s. She developed some of the earliest computer dialogue systems and established the research field of computational modeling of discourse. Her work on models of collaboration helped establish that field and provides the framework for several collaborative multi-agent and human-computer interface systems. Grosz has developed a theory of discourse structure that specifies how discourse interpretation depends on interactions among speaker intentions, attentional state, and linguistic form. She has been using the theory to study the use of intonation to convey information about discourse structure, for instance how tones demark, in spoken language, some of the structure that paragraphs and parentheses indicate in written language.

Books

Grosz contributed one chapter to the 2018 book ''Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it'' by the American futurist Martin Ford.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Grosz, Barbara J. Cornell University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Harvard University faculty Living people American computer scientists Artificial intelligence researchers SRI International people Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Women systems scientists Members of the American Philosophical Society History of artificial intelligence Santa Fe Institute people Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Presidents of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 1948 births Natural language processing researchers Computational linguistics researchers Computer scientists