Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE (

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

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

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

and

multi-agent system A multi-agent system (MAS or "self-organized system") is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents.H. Pan; M. Zahmatkesh; F. Rekabi-Bana; F. Arvin; J. HuT-STAR: Time-Optimal Swarm Trajectory Planning for Quadroto ...

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 organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

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 university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

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, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

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, inc ...

. She is responsible for Harvard being one of the first universities to integrate philosophy across different computer science courses. In 2019, Grosz co-authored "Embedded EthiCS: Integrating Ethics Across CS Education," emphasizing the importance of embedding ethical reasoning into computer science curricula.

Memberships and awards

Grosz is a member of the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...

(2003), the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) 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, and other ...

(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 Learned society, scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public under ...

(AAAI) (1990), the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a United States–based international nonprofit with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsib ...

(1990), and the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(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 Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and D ...

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 The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was establis ...

. 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 proce ...

Life Time Achievement Award.

Research

Grosz specializes in

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. She chaired the

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), also known as the National Academies, is a Congressional charter, congressionally chartered organization that serves as the collective scientific national academy of the Uni ...

committee that produced the 2022 report ''Fostering Responsible Computing Research: Foundations and Practices''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Grosz, Barbara J. Cornell University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Harvard University faculty Living people American computer scientists American artificial intelligence researchers SRI International people Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2003 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 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