Daniel Bauer

I am a senior lecturer in the Computer Science department at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Office Hours

Spring 2024: Mon 1:15pm-2:30pm (704 CEPSR), Tuesday 10:00-11:00am (Zoom, email for link)

Teaching

Spring 2024
COMS W4705- Natural Language Processing (two sections)

Past Semesters
COMS W4705- Natural Language Processing (Spring / Fall 2018, Summer 2019, Fall/Summer 2020, Summer 2021, Summer 2022, Spring/Summer/Fall 2023)
COMS W4995.1 - Topics in CS: Semantic Representations for Natural Language Processing (Spring 2021 & 2022)
COMS W4701 - Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2017)
ENGI E1006 - Intro. to Computing for Engi. and Appl. Scientists (Since Spring 2017)
COMS W3137 - Honors Data Structures and Algorithms (taught in Java and Scala, every Spring since 2017)
COMS W3134 - Data Structures in Java (Spring / Fall 2015 & 2016, Fall 2019, Summer 2020, Fall 2021)
SHAPE Summer High School Academic Program for Engineers (every summer since 2017)
COMS W3101 - Programming Languages: Python (Fall 2014)
COMS W3101 - Programming Languages: Scala (Fall 2014)
COMS W3101 - Programming Languages: Python (Spring 2012)

Research

If you are not a Columbia student, please do not contact me about research oportunities or internships.

My background is in Natural Language Processing / Computational Linguistics. The long-term mission of my research in this area is to develop systems that can accurately interpret natural language in a multimodal environment and in linguistic discourse. My work touches on syntactic and semantic parsing, grammar formalisms, lexical and computational semantics, knowledge representation, machine learning.
In my dissertation, I used synchronous graph grammars to translate sentences into graph-based representations of their meaning and developed efficient algorithms for grammar induction and parsing.

My current research interests in computer science education include integrating functional programming into the CS curriculum, understanding how pre-college computing experience shapes performance and attitudes in introductory CS courses, and techniques for improving student engagement and collaboration.

PhD students

Chad DeChant (website).

Education

2017 - Ph.D. Computer Science, Columbia University
2010 - M.Sc. in Language Science and Technology, Saarland University, Germany
2007 - B.Sc. Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Germany.

Other

I am a co-founder of WordsEye, a startup company that enables anyone to create 3D scenes by simply describing them in natural language.
I was an issue editor for the ACM XRDS Fall 2014 Issue on Natural Language.