Barbara J. Grosz

Barbara Jean Grosz
File:Barbara Grosz 01.JPG
Residence	USA
Nationality	American
Fields	Artificial Intelligence Natural language processing Multi-agent systems
Institutions	Harvard University
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley Cornell University
Thesis	The Representation and Use of Focus in Dialogue Understanding (1977)
Doctoral advisor	Martin H. Graham
Doctoral students	Martha E. Pollack, Jill S. Nickerson
Notable awards	IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (2015)

Barbara J. Grosz is the Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems.

Education

Grosz earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Cornell University in 1969, and master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and 1977, respectively.

Research

Grosz specializes in natural language processing and multi-agent systems. 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.

Career

Grosz established and led interdisciplinary institutions, and advanced the role of women in science. From 2007-2011, Grosz served as interim dean and then dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and from 2001-2007 she was the Institute’s first dean of science, designing and building its science program.

Memberships and awards

Grosz is a member of the American Philosophical Society (2003), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004), and the National Academy of Engineering (2008). She is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (1990), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2004).

In 2015, she received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence for her pioneering research in Natural Language Processing and in theories and applications of Multiagent Collaboration. In 2009, 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 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.