Julia Hirschberg and David Blei elected 2015 ACM Fellows

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 2015, her publications have been cited 14,161 times, and she has an h-index of 60.

Hirschberg serves on numerous technical boards and editorial committees, including the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee and the board 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.

Among many honors, she is a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011), of the International Speech Communication Association (2008), of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (1994); and she is a recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award (2011) and the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement (2011). In 2007, she received an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and in 2014 was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

David Blei is a Professor of Computer Science and Statistics and a member of the Data Science Institute. He is a leading researcher in the field of probabilistic statistical machine learning and topic models, having co-authored (with Michael I. Jordan and Andrew Y. Ng) the seminal paper on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), the standard algorithm for discovering the abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of documents. LDA has become an important statistical tool and is used to capture interpretable patterns in a range of applications, including document summarization, indexing, genomics, and image database analysis.

In addition to continuing work on topic models, Blei develops models of social networks, music and audio, images and computer vision, and neuroscience and brain activity. Recent work with students has resulted in efficient algorithms to fit a wide class of statistical models to massive data sets, enlarging the scale of data that can be analyzed using sophisticated methods.

“I am deeply honored to have been elected an ACM fellow,” says Blei. “The ACM is a wonderful organization—for many years it has nurtured the fantastic intellectual and community spirit of computer science.”

Blei’s research has earned him a Sloan Fellowship (2010), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2011), the NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2011), the Blavatnik Faculty Award (2013), and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2013). He is the author and co-author of over 80 research papers.

Before coming to Columbia in 2014, Blei was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and his BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics from Brown University.