Julia Hirschberg and Luca Carloni elevated to IEEE Fellow

Two professors in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University have been named Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): Julia Hirschberg for “contributions to text-to-speech synthesis and spoken language understanding,” and Luca Carloni for “contributions to system-on-chip design automation and latency-insensitive design.” Recognizing an individual’s outstanding record of accomplishments, the IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of IEEE membership, limited every year to one-tenth of one-percent of the total voting membership.

Julia Hirschberg is the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Department. She is also a member of the Data Science Institute. Her main area of research is computational linguistics, with a focus on the relationship between intonation and discourse. Current projects include deceptive speech, spoken dialogue systems, entrainment in dialogue, speech synthesis, speech search in low-resource languages, and hedging behaviors.

“I’m very pleased to receive this honor from my friends and colleagues,” says Hirschberg.

Upon receiving her PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, Hirschberg went to work at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where in the 1980s and 1990s she pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in text-to-speech synthesis, developing corpus-based statistical models that incorporate syntactic and discourse information, models that are in general use today. She joined Columbia University faculty in 2002 as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and has served as department chair since 2012.

As of November 2016, her publications have been cited 15,628 times, and she has an h-index of 62.

Among many honors, Hirschberg is a 2015 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Fellow also of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011), of the International Speech Communication Association (2008), and of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (1994). In 2011, she was honored with the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and also the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement. In 2007, she was granted an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and in 2014 was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Hirschberg serves on numerous technical boards and editorial committees, including the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee and is co-chair of CRA-W. Previously she served as editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics and co-editor-in-chief of Speech Communication and was on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL); on the Executive Board of the North American ACL; on the CRA Board of Directors; on the AAAI Council; on the Permanent Council of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP); and on the board of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). She is also noted for her leadership in promoting diversity, both at AT&T and Columbia, and broadening participation in computing.

Luca Carloni is an Associate Professor within the Computer Science Department, where he leads the System-Level Design Group. His research centers on next-generation chip design, including methodologies and tools for system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, multi-core architectures, embedded systems, computer-aided design, hardware-software integration, and cyber-physical systems. He is also a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute.

“I am very honored to have been elected an IEEE fellow,” says Carloni. “The IEEE is a great organization that supports the work and research of many electrical and computer engineers worldwide.”

For his seminal contributions to system-level design, Carloni received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2006 from the National Science Foundation. In 2008 he was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and two years later received the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award.

In November 2015, Carloni was one of four guest editors of a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE on the evolution of Electronic Design Automation and its future developments; in the same issue, his article “From Latency-Insensitive Design to Communication-Based System-Level Design” addressed the challenges of engineering system-on-chip platforms while proposing a new design paradigm to cope with their complexity.

Carloni is coauthor of Photonic Network-on-Chip Design (Integrated Circuits and Systems) and over one hundred and thirty refereed papers. He received the best paper award at DATE’12 for the paper “Compositional System-Level Design Exploration with Planning of High-Level Synthesis” and at CloudCom’12 for the paper “A Broadband Embedded Computing System for MapReduce Utilizing Hadoop.” He coauthored “A Methodology for Correct-by-Construction Latency-Insensitive Design” (1999), which was selected for The Best of ICCAD, a collection of the best papers published at the IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design from 1982 to 2002. Carloni holds two patents.

As of November 2016, his publications have been cited 5,000 times, and he has an h-index of 36.

Currently an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Carloni previously was associate editor of the ACM Transactions in Embedded Computing Systems (2006-2013). He is active in his research community, serving on numerous technical program committees. In 2010 he was technical program co-chair of the International Conference on Embedded Software, the International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NOCS), and the International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for Codesign. He was also vice general chair (in 2012) and general chair (in 2013) of Embedded Systems Week, the premier event covering all aspects of embedded systems and software. Carloni is also co-leader of the Platform Architectures theme in the Gigascale Systems Research Center and participates in the Center for Future Architectures Research.

At Columbia since 2004, Carloni holds a Laurea Degree Summa cum Laude in Electronics Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, a Master of Science in Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was the 2002 recipient of the Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award in recognition of altruistic attitude towards fellow graduate students.

Posted 11/29/2016