Julia Hirschberg

Julia Hirschberg is the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where she served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2012-2018. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and previously worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories -- Research from 1985-2003 as a Member of Technical Staff and Department Head, where she created the Human-Computer Interface Research Department.

Dr. Hirschberg has held numerous leadership positions in professional organizations, including serving as editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics (1993-2003), co-editor-in-chief of Speech Communication (2003-2006), and on the Executive Boards of the Association for Computational Linguistics, International Speech Communication Association (where she served as President 2005-2007), Computing Research Association, AAAI, and IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. She co-chaired the CRA's Committee on Women from 2016-2019 and has been active in working for diversity at AT&T and Columbia.

Her research spans Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Human-Computer Interaction, with significant contributions to text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition, and the analysis of entrainment, empathy, personality, emotion, humor, sarcasm, deception, trust, radicalization, and charisma in spoken language. She teaches Advanced Spoken Language Processing (COMS 6706) covering these topics with applications including dialogue systems and multimodal analysis.

• AAAI Fellow (1994)
• ISCA Fellow (2008)
• ACL Fellow (2011)
• ACM Fellow (2015)
• IEEE Fellow (2017)
• Member, National Academy of Engineering (2017)
• Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018)
• Member, National Academy of Artificial Intelligence Academy of Sciences (2025)
• Elected to American Philosophical Society (2014)
• IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award (2011)
• ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement (2011)
• ISCA Special Service Medal (2020)
• Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award (2009)
• Janette and Armen Avanessians Diversity Award (2018)

Dr. Hirschberg has advised numerous students and has been instrumental in advancing diversity in computing. She has received honorary doctorates from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) Stockholm (2007) and Tilburg University (2018). As an Amazon Scholar from 2020-2025, she continues to bridge academic research and industry applications. She leads the Columbia Speech Lab, which focuses on cutting-edge research in spoken language processing using multimodal approaches that integrate acoustic-prosodic features, linguistic analysis, and machine learning techniques.