Kathleen R. McKeown

Kathleen R. McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and the Founding Director of Columbia's Data Science Institute (2012-2017). She has been a faculty member since 1982 and served as Department Chair (1998-2003) and Vice Dean for Research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Her research focuses on natural language processing, text summarization, natural language generation, and social media analysis. Current projects include neural methods for extractive/abstractive summarization, electricity usage message generation via reinforcement learning, and social media sentiment analysis in low-resource languages like Uyghur. She leads the Columbia NLP Group and developed the long-running Newsblaster system (2001-present) for automated news tracking and multi-document summarization.

Key scientific awards include

• NSF Presidential Young Investigator (1985)
• NSF Faculty Award for Women (1991)
• AAAI Fellow (1994)
• ACM Fellow (2003)
• ACL Founding Fellow (2012)
• Columbia Great Teacher Award (2010)
• Anita Borg Woman of Vision Award (2010)

She has held leadership roles in major academic organizations: President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1992), Vice President (1991), Secretary-Treasurer (1995-1997), and board member of the Computing Research Association with secretary role.