William W. Cohen

William W. Cohen is a Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department and holds a 20%-time appointment at Google. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1990 and has held roles at AT&T Bell Labs, Whizbang Labs, and CMU. His research focuses on machine learning, NLP, neuro-symbolic reasoning, and knowledge representation.

Education: B.S. (Duke, 1984), PhD (Rutgers, 1990).

Research Interests: Cohen's work spans question answering, NLP tasks, and neuro-symbolic systems. He emphasizes scalable reasoning methods and has contributed to systems like Never-Ending Learning (NELL) and knowledge graph construction. Recent efforts include improving large language model evaluation and retrieval-augmented generation.

Awards: AAAI Fellow (2006), 2008 SIGMOD Test of Time Award, 2014 SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2023 Semantic Web Science Ten-Year Award. His work on subtopic retrieval (SIGIR 2003) and data integration (SIGMOD 1998) are foundational.

Grants & Advising: Supervised over 50 students, including notable figures like Bhuwan Dhingra (now at Duke) and Zhilin Yang. Active in funding projects related to AI ethics, knowledge graphs, and scalable learning systems.

Labs & Teams: Core contributor to the NELL project and collaborator on initiatives like the Knowledge Vault and Open Information Extraction systems. Currently involved in developing robust AI evaluation frameworks and multimodal reasoning systems.