Margaret M. Fleck

Margaret M. Fleck is a Teaching Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, associated with the Discrete Structures and Artificial Intelligence course sequences. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a B.A. in Linguistics from Yale.

• Education: MIT Ph.D. (EE&CS), Yale B.A. (Linguistics)

Her research spans computational linguistics, speech processing, and computer vision, with a focus on unsupervised word boundary detection, prosodic feature analysis, and hybrid programming environments for AI and vision tasks. Notable works include the Berkeley-Iowa Naked People Finder and Schwa 1.0 language system.

Key article trends include speech prosody analysis, language acquisition, computer vision systems, and educational technology. She received the Rose Teaching Award in 2019 and has advised students who now hold faculty positions at institutions like MIT and SUNY Buffalo. Her teaching emphasizes frequent assessments, readable materials, and interleaved technique-application pedagogy.

Selected Awards:

• Rose Teaching Award (2019)

Advising Legacy: Mentored students in computational linguistics and computer vision, including Ph.D. theses on jigsaw algorithms and road sign detection.