Jaime Guillermo Carbonell (July 29, 1953 – February 28, 2020) was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development 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 ...
tools and technologies. His extensive research in
machine translation resulted in the development of several state-of-the-art language translation and artificial intelligence systems. He earned his
B.S. degrees in
Physics
Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...
and in
Mathematics
Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...
from
MIT in 1975 and did his
Ph.D. under Dr.
Roger Schank at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
in 1979. He joined
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...
as an assistant professor of computer science in 1979 and lived in Pittsburgh from then. He was affiliated with the
Language Technologies Institute, Computer Science Department, Machine Learning Department, and
Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon.
His interests spanned several areas of
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
,
language technologies and
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
. In particular, his research focused on areas such as
text mining (extraction, categorization, novelty detection) and in new theoretical frameworks such as a unified utility-based theory bridging
information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...
,
summarization, free-text
question-answering and related tasks. He also worked on
machine translation, both high-accuracy knowledge-based MT and machine learning for
corpus-based MT (such as generalized
example-based MT).
Career
Carbonell was the Allen Newell Professor of Computer Science and head of the
Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined Carnegie Mellon in 1979 and became a key faculty member in the artificial intelligence area. He was appointed full professor in 1987, Newell Chair in 1995, and University Professor in 2012.
He did his undergraduate studies at MIT, getting dual degrees in Mathematics and Physics. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1979.
At the time of his appointment, Carbonell was the youngest chaired professor in the School of Computer Science at CMU. He was considered creative, insightful, and highly productive as a researcher. His research spanned several areas of computer science, mostly in artificial intelligence, including: machine learning, data and text mining, natural language processing, very-large-scale knowledge bases, translingual information retrieval and automated summarization. He wrote more than 300 technical papers and gave over 500 invited or refereed-paper presentations (colloquia, seminars, panels, conferences, keynotes, etc.). He died following a long illness on February 28, 2020. Mona Talat Diab became the director of CMU's Language Technologies Institute in the Fall 2023.
Research
Some of Carbonell's major scientific accomplishments included the creation of MMR (maximal marginal relevance) technology for text summarization and informational novelty detection in search engines, invention of transformational analogy, a generalized method for
case-based reasoning (CBR) to re-use, modify and compose past successful plans for increasingly complex problems and Knowledge-based interlingual machine translation. He was instrumental in setting up the Computational Biolinguistics Program, a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, which combines Language Technologies and Machine Learning to model and predict genomic, proteomic and glycomic 3D structures.
Carbonell was particularly well known in machine learning. He organized the first four machine learning conferences, starting with CMU in 1981. The
Language Technologies Institute (LTI), founded and directed by Carbonell, achieved top honors in multiple areas. These areas include machine translation, search engines (including founding of
Lycos
Lycos, Inc. (stylized as LYCOS), is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company ...
by
Michael Mauldin, one of Carbonell’s PhD students), speech synthesis, and education. LTI remains the original, largest and best-known institute for language technologies, with over $12M in annual funding and 200 researchers (faculty, staff, PhD students, MS students, visiting scholars etc.).
Carbonell made major technical contributions in several fields, including (1) Creation of MMR
(maximal marginal relevance) technology for text summarization and informational novelty detection in
search engines,(2) Proactive machine learning for multi-source cost-sensitive active learning, (3) Linked
conditional random fields for predicting tertiary and quaternary protein folds, (4) Symmetric optimal
phrasal alignment method for trainable example-based and statistical machine translation, (5) Series-
anomaly modeling for financial fraud detection and syndromic surveillance, (6) Knowledge-based
interlingual machine translation, (7) Robust case-frame parsing, (8) Seeded version-space learning and
(9) Invention of transformational and derivational analogy, generalized methods for case-based reasoning
(CBR) to re-use, modify and compose past successful plans for increasingly complex problems.
The teams led by Carbonell achieved top honors in many areas such as first scalable high-accuracy
interlingual machine translation (1991), first speech-to-speech machine translation (1992), first large-scale
spider and search engine (1994), and first trainable, large-scale protein-structure topology predictor
(2005). Modern machine learning, co-founded by Carbonell, Michalski and Mitchell, is a fundamental
enabling technology in search engines, data mining and social networking. Starting in 1980, he co-edited
the first three books on ML, launched the ML conferences and was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of ML
Journal. Carbonell’s innovations have led to several successful start-ups: Carnegie Group (AI expertsystems),
Lycos (web search), Wisdom (financial optimization & ML), Carnegie Speech (spoken-language
tutoring), Dynamix (data mining and pattern discovery), and Meaningful Machines (context-based machine
translation). Carbonell was the founding director of The Language Technology Institute, the preeminent
global institution in language studies, unparalleled in size and scope and has since been
adopted/imitated in Germany (DFKI), Japan (Tokyo Univ.), and the US (Johns Hopkins).
Awards and honors
Okawa Prize 2015
* Best paper award, “Translingual Search” w/Yang, International Joint Conference on AI, 1997
* Allen Newell endowed chair, Carnegie Mellon University, 1995
* Elected fellow of AAAI, 1991
* Computer Science teaching award, Carnegie Mellon University, 1987
* Sperry Fellowship for excellence in AI research, 1986
* Herbert Simon teaching award, 1986
* "Recognition of Service" award from the ACM for the SIGART presidency, 1983–1985
* Provided congressional testimony on machine translation, 1990
Selected works
Books
* 1983. (with
Ryszard S. Michalski &
Tom M. Mitchell, Eds.) ''Machine learning: An artificial intelligence approach''. Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
* 1986. (with Ryszard S. Michalski & Tom Mitchell, Eds.) ''Machine learning: An artificial intelligence approach''. Vol. II. Los Altos, CA: Morgan-Kaufmann.
* 1986. (with Ryszard S. Michalski & Tom Mitchell, Eds.) ''Machine Learning: A Guide to Current Research''. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Contributions
*“Protein Quaternary Fold Recognition Using Conditional Graphical Models” IJCAI 2007 (w/Liu et al.)
*“Context-Based Machine Translation” AMTA 2006 (w/Klein et al.)
*“SCRFs: A New Approach for Protein Fold Recognition,’’ Journal of Computational Biology, 13,2, 2006 (w/Liu et al)
*“MT for Resource-Poor Languages Using Elicitation-Based Learning” Machine Translation, 2004
*‘‘Learning Approaches for Detecting and Tracking News Events,’’ IEEE Trans I.S., 14, 4, 2000 (w/Yang)
References
External links
Home Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Carbonell, Jaime G.
Carnegie Mellon University faculty
American computer scientists
Machine learning researchers
Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
1953 births
2020 deaths
Uruguayan emigrants to the United States
Natural language processing researchers
Machine translation researchers
American translation scholars