Natural Language Processing with People, for People, by People

Please join Prof. Alec Gallimore, Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering; Prof. Michael Wellman, Richard H. Orenstein Division Chair of Computer Science and Engineering; EECS Professor Emerita Janice M. Jenkins; and the Computer Science and Engineering Division as we honor Prof. Rada Mihalcea for her appointment to a collegiate professorship.

Professor Mihalcea will be installed as the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and will present a lecture.

Biography – Rada Mihalcea

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, computational social sciences, and multimodal language processing. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2009 and Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2011, and a general chair for North American ACL 2015 and *SEM 2019. She directs multiple diversity and mentorship initiatives, including Girls Encoded and the ACL Year-Round Mentorship program. She currently serves as ACL President. She is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009), and was named an ACM Fellow (2019) and an AAAI Fellow (2021). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Biography – Janice M. Jenkins

Professor Emerita Janice M. Jenkins joined the U-M faculty as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and was promoted to professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and of biomedical engineering, in 1992. She was the first woman hired as a faculty member in the U-M EECS Department. Jenkins received her BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1974, 1976, and 1978, respectively, and was an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and of medicine, at Northwestern University from 1979-1980. At U-M, Jenkins made important contributions to automated arrhythmia analysis using advanced signal processing and computer techniques. She was director of the medical computing research laboratory (1981-2002), and of the digital design laboratory (1983-1998), an instructional laboratory on the design of microprocessor based systems that she initiated and taught. In 1991, Jenkins received the U-M Sarah Goddard Power Award for her outstanding professional achievements and contributions to the education of women, and the NSF Faculty Award for Women in Science and Engineering. Jenkins is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American College of Cardiology.