News flash (December 21, 2024). UMD colleagues and I have just been awarded a university seed grant for a project called "Computational Social Neuroscience in the Wild". The project will investigate real-time social situations by using computational models of behavior during natural two-way social interactions. It seeks to build a more integrated computational framework of how the brain learns about, dynamically updates, and communicates with a social partner. We'll be collecting data from people's brains as they engage in collaborative tasks and looking at how common ground (in the linguistic sense) relates to synchrony of neural activity. Hopefully this will produce pilot data suitable for a full scale NIH research proposal in a year or so.

News flash (December 5, 2024). I gave an invited talk entitled "Using LLMs to Analyze What People Mean, Not Just What They Say" at University of Michigan in their Data Science/Computational Social Science Seminar.

News flash (June 19, 2024). I posted Large Language Models are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models on arXiv. The paper is currently in peer review and argues that harmful biases are an inevitable consequence arising from the design of any large language model as LLMs are currently formulated, and therefore we need a serious reconsideration of AI driven by LLMs, going back to the foundational assumptions underlying their design.

News flash (June 6, 2024). I am senior author on The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Techniques, a paper now out as a preprint. Nice summary article here. Led by Sander Schulhoff, this was a fairly massive, multi-author undertaking that has been getting quite a lot of media attention.

News flash (MEDIA, April 27, 2024): Work with my collaborator and mentee, UMD School of Medicine assistant professor Katie Goodman, was featured in an article in Infectious Disease News. The article/interview discusses promising initial results, in work funded by our MPower seed grant, on analyzing clinical records to detect long-term care facility (LTCF) exposure, which is a risk factor for carriage of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs).

Sorry for the news flash gap! Needed to take a break from updates for family reasons.

News flash (February 3, 2023): Got featured in today's campus newspaper in an article about use of ChatGPT in the classroom.

News flash (November 29, 2022): I was honored to be invited to AWS re:Invent, a huge (60,000+ person) annual Amazon technical conference, as one of the two profs featured in their first-ever speaker session focused on academic research for which Amazon provided support through their Amazon Research Awards program. [video of talk]

News flash (November 7, 2022): I'm delighted and honored to have been named an MPower Professor here at UMD! This is a 3-year title designed to recognize and foster collaboration between faculty here in College Park and at UMB, i.e. the School of Medicine, School of Pharmacy, etc. It will provide additional research funding supporting my collaborations on mental health and clinical NLP. [more info]

News flash (August 15, 2022): Thrilled that FiscalNote has gone public! I became a member of the company's board of advisors in 2015, and my amazing PhD grad Vlad Eidelman is Chief Technology Officer & Chief Scientist. Huge congrats to Vlad and the whole company.

News flash (June 20, 2022): I was featured on the panel on AI and Data Ethics at Digital Innovation and Mental Health. The video is here (about 50min in length).

News flash (June 6, 2022): I gave an invited talk, "Why Do Misinformation Spreaders Also Share Information from Reliable Sources? The Role of Fake-News Narratives", at the MEDIATE workshop on misinformation at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).

News flash (May 12, 2022): I presented on "Moving from Individual Predictions to Population Priorities in Suicide Prevention", and joined in a panel discussion, at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Workshop on Innovative Data Science Approaches to Assess Suicide Risk in Individuals, Populations, and Communities: Current Practices, Opportunities, and Risks. [video]

News flash (March 8, 2022): Just got some seed funding to work on NLP for electronic health records, looking at better ways to identify people who come into hospitals as "silent carriers" of antibiotics-resistant bacteria.

News flash (December 17, 2021): I gave a keynote at ICON 2021: 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, organized by NLP Association India, entitled "Mental Health as an Application Area for Natural Language Processing: Prospects and Challenges".

News flash (June 3, 2021): I am pleased and honored to have been appointed to the Scientific and Technical Advisory Board of the Coleridge Initiative, a nonprofit that is working with governments to ensure that data are more effectively used for public decision-making. Story here.

News flash (June 2, 2021): I gave a talk at the AWS Machine Learning Summit entitled Analyzing Social Media for Suicide Risk using Natural Language Processing; video now available here.

News flash (MEDIA, May 11, 2021): Here's an interview in Amazon Science related to my talk on June 2 as a featured speaker at the AWS Machine Learning Summit.

News flash (April 27, 2021): Delighted to be a recipient of a new 2020 Amazon Research Award for research on advanced topic modeling to support the understanding of COVID-19 and its effects.

News flash (February 16, 2021): I'm proud to be part of a crazy-long author list for this journal article in Frontiers in Digital Health, led by the unstoppable Becky Inkster, which reported on an effort involving digital providers and experts from over 20 countries to gather insights about mental health during the pandemic from potentially upwards of 50 million users worldwide. Nice article about the report is here.

News flash (MEDIA, February 9, 2021): I'm really pleased that a very nice Amazon Science article on my mental health research has just dropped, and is featured at the moment on their Success Stories page.

News flash (December 18, 2020): I'm pleased my work on survey responses has proven useful for the Westat/Stanford University School of Medicine Coronavirus Attitudes and Behaviors study, a nationally representative survey fielded this spring to provide insights into how Americans perceive the risks of coronavirus and how these perceptions impact their behaviors.

News flash (November 27, 2020): I'm honored to have been named an ACL Fellow! Each year the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, the professional research society for computational linguistics and natural language processing) names a small number of new ACL Fellows. Extra sweet is that this year's new set also includes Noah Smith, who got his start in computational linguistics as my undergraduate advisee.

News flash (MEDIA, October 21, 2020): Rebecca Resnik and I guested together on the MDedge Psychcast podcast, talking about "Using technology and data-driven systems to help detect signs of mental distress".

News flash (September 4, 2020): My postdoc Shohini Bhattasali did a great 90-second presentation for the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) Conference talking about "Differentiating between broad & local context cues using surprisal: An fMRI study".

News flash (MEDIA, August 19, 2020): I had a great conversation with Dr. Lorenzo Norris on the MDedge Psychast podcast, talking about using AI to screen for mood disorders and suicide risk.

News flash (August 5, 2020): I have been awarded NSF funding for a new project entitled Modeling Co-Decisions: A Computational Framework Using Language and Metadata (story). This project is aimed at better understanding decision-making by looking at both metadata and language as sources of information helping to predict when two individuals will make the same choice and why. We will develop new computational models of co-decision in political contexts (co-voting), look at substantive questions about legislative decision-making (with politicial scientist Kris Miler), and also go beyond the political domain to look at decisions about citation in the scientific literature.

News flash (July 9, 2020): I gave one of the keynote talks at the 2020 ACL Workshop on Fact Extraction and Verification (FEVER 3). (talk)

News flash (May 12, 2020): Amazon AWS has been kind enough to provide some computing horsepower, in the form of AWS promotional credits, in support of rapid-turnaround research on text analysis of the COVID-19 research literature. This dovetails with the work we're doing under new NSF RAPID funding on analysis of open-ended survey responses.

News flash (May 5, 2020): I have been awarded NSF RAPID funding for rapid-turnaround COVID-19 related research, for a project developing and using advanced topic modeling methods to analyze text responses in COVID-19 survey data. The work will be applied in survey methods research with CDC, and we will also conduct and analyze surveys connected with mental health crisis management and survey front-line healthcare providers.

News flash (April 22, 2020): Colleagues and I have been awarded funding under the AI+Medicine for High Impact (AIM-HI) program, which brings together faculty from the University of Maryland, College Park, with medical experts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, for research on audio, video, and text analysis for assessment of mental illness.

News flash (March 5, 2020): I gave a keynote talk at the 11th Health Survey Research Methods conference (HSRM 2020).

News flash (November 16, 2019): I gave a keynote talk at the Conference on Health IT & Analytics (CHITA), an annual health IT and analytics research summit.

News flash (MEDIA, July 12, 2019): I wrote a column accompanying today's featured report in CQ Researcher,which looks at the suicide crisis, articulating the pro position on the pro/con question, "Can computerized risk-assessment tools reduce the suicide rate?".

News flash (MEDIA, June 3, 2019): I was quoted in the June 3 cover story in CQ Magazine "Government Struggles to Rein In Artificial Intelligence Programs", which focuses on movement toward regulation and legislation related to AI. [PDF]

News flash (May 15, 2019): Jason Baldridge and I recorded an episode of the NLP Highlights podcast focused on academic and industry careers.

News flash (April 26, 2019): I'm very pleased to have been invited as a keynote speaker at the Eleventh Conference on Health Survey Research Methods (HSRM 2020), which focuses on improving the quality of health care data collection to identify major problems and needs, and define issues, hypotheses, and priorities to guide future research.

News flash (April 26, 2019): With NIH postdoc Ayah Zirikly, I gave an American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) webinar, The Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: An Overview.

News flash (March 8, 2019): I spoke at the Workshop on Machine Learning and Applications at UMD on machine learning for mental health.

News flash (February 26, 2019): Announcing the Shared Task on suicidality assessment from social media, as part of the 2019 CLPsych Workshop.

News flash (January 29, 2019): I enjoyed doing the Inside Angle podcast with Dr. Gordon Moore, where we discussed machine learning, natural language processing, health records, and mental health: Listen here!

News flash (November 5, 2018): This week I will be the keynote speaker at the Workshop on Computing for Physical and Mental Health at Georgetown University.

News flash (September 30, 2018): As a wonderful event near the official start of my 2018-2019 sabbatical, I spoke at the 2018 Erikson Institute Fall Conference for Scientists, Researchers, Scholars, and Clinicians at the Austen Riggs Center, entitled "DUALITY’S END: Computational Psychiatry and the Cognitive Science of Representation", which also included luminaries like Stephen Kosslyn, Paul Thagard, and Rebecca Resnik.

News flash (May 29, 2018): I have received an Amazon Machine Learning Research Award, which will help support my sabbatical project on Tackling the AI Mental Health Data Crisis.

News flash (May 18, 2018): I'm very excited to be one of the invited speakers at the Austen Riggs Center's upcoming 2018 Erikson Institute Fall Conference for Scientists, Researchers, Scholars, and Clinicians alongside amazing fellow speakers Stephen Kosslyn, Paul Thagard, and Alan Anticevic. This is a conference on computational psychiatry, and I'll be talking about computational methods for finding predictive mental health signal in language data, particularly social media, including discussion about the challenges of obtaining suitable data for research and ways of meeting those challenges.

News flash (April 16, 2018): My student Jackie Nelligan, co-advised with Naomi Feldman, has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!

News flash (April 3, 2018):A collaborative proposal I've submitted has been selected by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI) funding. The project, titled "Generating Documents that are Consistent with a Knowledge Base" is led by Prof Sushil Jajodia of George Mason University and includes VS Subrahmanian (Dartmouth), Noah Smith (Univ of Washington), Hannaneh Hajishirzi (Univ of Washington), and myself. The project is listed as item #19 in the awards announcement.

News flash (January 31, 2018): Call for papers is out for the 5th annual Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, which I'm co-organizing. Papers due March 2 plus look for a shared task announcement soon.

News flash (January 14, 2018): My 2002 paper with Mona Diab has been nominated for NAACL's new Test-of-Time Paper Award. I'm also pleased to be very high up in ACL's new most productive 1000 authors list, whether you measure by number of papers (36th), citations (46th), collaborators (45th), or h-index (22nd).

News flash (MEDIA, January 5, 2018): I was quoted in Politico Magazine's cover story today, which focuses on FiscalNote, a DC company that I advise. Vlad Eidelman, FiscalNote's VP of Research, was my PhD advisee.

News flash (October 11, 2017): I will be speaking at the Workshop on Culture, Language, and Behavior organized by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, which is connected with with NAS's Decadal Survey of Social and Behavioral Sciences for National Security.

News flash (October 2, 2017): I gave a presentation with my UMB/UMD seed grant co-investigator Deanna Kelly at the 10th Annual Seed Grant Program Reception, celebrating ten years of joint research between UMD's medical school (Univ of Maryland Baltimore) and the main campus.

News flash (August 30, 2017): I am finally getting to teach a seminar that I first proposed 22 years ago (!): a violently multidisciplinary language seminar where we are looking at a single linguistic phenomenon from the perspectives of syntactic theory, computational linguistics, and psycho/neurolinguistics, in order to expose and understand foundational assumptions and concepts that each perspective on linguistic research takes for granted.

News flash (May 18, 2017): At the conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR 2017), I co-taught a course with qualitative research guru Andrew Stavisky: An Introduction to Practical Text Analytics for Qualitative Research.

News flash (January 12, 2017): I have been elected to the Executive Board of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), which is the primary professional organization for computational linguists in the Americas.

News flash (January 12, 2017): President Barack Obama has named my student Chris Dyer (PhD, Linguistics, 2010) a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, story here). The award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

News flash (December 20, 2016):I was listed on the AMiner Most Influential Scholar Annual List as a Most Influential Scholar for "outstanding and vibrant contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence". AMiner is an online service for academic social network analysis and mining.

News flash (October 27, 2016): I'm very excited that our chapter about the React Labs platform has now appeared in a newly published book on Political Communication in Real Time (Routledge).

News flash (October 25, 2016): A nice news posting about the official announcement of the seed grant awarded to Deanna Kelly (UMB Psychiatry) to work on computational modeling for identifying symptom changes in schizophrenia and depression.

News flash (August 12, 2016): Allyson Ettinger, Ahmed Elgohary, and I have won a Best Proposal award for our paper, Probing for semantic evidence of composition by means of simple classification tasks, at the ACL 2016 RepEval Workshop on new evaluation methods for evaluating vector space representations in NLP.

News flash (June 20, 2016): Deanna Kelly (Professor in Psychiatry at UMB) and I have been awarded a UMB-UMCP seed grant for our project entitled "Development of Computational Modeling to Identify Symptom Changes in Schizophrenia and Depression". Very excited that we're going to be able to move forward with this work.

News flash (April 20, 2016): I've just been awarded a Bloomberg Research Award with Amber Boydstun, Justin Gross, and Noah Smith, in support of a project we're calling "What’s The Angle? Disentangling Perspectives from Content in the News", where we'll be looking at patterns of framing in how news subjects are covered. According to the announcement from Bloomberg, competition was pretty stiff: a committee of Bloomberg researchers selected eight research projects out of hundreds of applications from faculty members at universities around the world.

News flash (April 20, 2016): I'm an invited speaker for the upcoming CASRO Technology & Innovation Event in June. CASRO is the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, whose member organizations include about 85% of the U.S. market research, business intelligence, and survey research industry. I'm managing on what's coming next in social media analytics and we've now got Jason Boxt of Glover Park Group and Jason Baldridge of People Pattern joining in. This is going to be fun.

News flash (October 28, 2015): I've joined the Advisory Board of FiscalNote, a very exciting startup that provides a real-time legal analytics platform to track, analyze, and forecast legal and policy data. (press release)

News flash (September 9, 2015): I was one of the NLP experts invited to participate in the Veteran's Administration's Natural Language Processing State of Science Conference, which brought together folks from inside and outside the organization to discuss applications of NLP to problems of interest to the VA.

News flash (June 25, 2015): Not exactly a news item, but I've just posted some thoughts on my research and the question of social impact.

News flash (May 17, 2015): I spoke on a panel at the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) 70th Annual Conference, entitled "Social Media Data Mining: Staying on the Cutting Edge".

News flash (MEDIA, May 14, 2015): My comments are included in an article in Independent Banker magazine entitled "Almost Human: the near future of artificial intelligence and smart machines in community banking" (May 2015 issue, here's the online version).

News flash (March 14, 2015): I had a great time organizing this morning's panel at SXSW Interactive entitled Are You in a Social Media Experiment?, with awesome co-panelists Jen Golbeck, Jason Baldridge, and Michelle Zhou.

News flash (November 25, 2014): I'm honored to be included on People Pattern's list of data scientists to watch.

News flash (MEDIA, November 12, 2014): Just days after a hackathon that I helped organize on language analysis for mental health, Newsweek published this nice article on the topic highlighting my perspective along with collaborators Carol Espy-Wilson and (hackathon organizer) Glen Coppersmith.

News flash (October 24, 2014): I spoke at the 2014 Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ) Special Issue Conference on ``Real-Time Reactions to a 2012 Presidential Debate: A Method for Understanding Which Messages Matter'' about my POQ publication ``Real-Time Reactions to a 2012 Presidential Debate: A Method for Understanding Which Messages Matter'' (co-authored with Amber Boydstun, Rebecca Glazier, and Matt Pietryka).

News flash (October 21, 2014): I've been appointed to the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) Advisory Committee on Statistics, Machine Learning, and High Performance Computing.

News flash (MEDIA, October 3, 2014): My standing-on-a-soapbox efforts to talk about clinical language and electronic health records are highlighted in a blog post today at Healthcare IT News.

News flash (MEDIA, July 29, 2014): I helped out some Wall Street Journal friends in the analysis behind their front-page July 16th story Chief Justice John Roberts has made the Supreme Court the friendliest bar in Washington, which has also been picked up in ABA Journal.

News flash (MEDIA, July 15, 2014): I had an interesting conversation on NPR on The Kojo Nnamdi Show's Tech Tuesday, discussing sentiment analysis with Kojo, Kristin Muhlner, CEO of New Brand Analytics, and Kalev (rhymes with 'olive') Leetaru. Fun fact: my Linguistics PhD advisee Stephan Greene is now New Brand's Director of Natural Language Processing.

News flash (June 27, 2014): Together with Rebecca Resnik and Meg Mitchell, I organized a highly successful Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. See the proceedings for some great work.

News flash (June 26, 2014): I was an invited speaker at the excellent ACL Workshop on Language Technologies and Computational Social Science in Baltimore, with a talk entitled ``I Want to Talk About, Again, My Record On Energy...'': Modeling Agendas and Framing in Political Debates and Other Conversations.

News flash (May 7, 2014): React Labs partnered with the Washington Post to collect responses to a Maryland Democratic gubernatorial debate.

News flash (February 24, 2014): React Labs was one of the companies featured at at the Austin TechBreakfast Kickoff Spectacular at SXSW on March 7, and at TechBreakfastNYC on March 18.

News flash (MEDIA, January 28, 2014): Once again I had a great time appearing on NPR on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, this time with machine learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and brilliant Stanford grad student Richard Socher, talking about deep learning.

News flash (January 1, 2014): React Labs will be one of the companies featured in the Startup Spotlight at SXSW on March 7. I'm also the organizer for a cool panel the next day at SXSW on real-time opinion gathering, with co-panelists Rana el Kaliouby of Affectiva, Martin Salo of Realeyes, and Gary Kazantsev of Bloomberg.

News flash (May 29, 2013): React Labs has been awarded $100,000 in funding from the Maryland Innovation Initiative.

News flash (May 8, 2013): I presented a talk on Getting Real(-time) with Live Polling at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium.

News flash (MEDIA, March 25, 2013): A Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism was awarded to Politico, NewsChannel8, and ABC7/WJLA-TV, who utilized the React Labs mobile polling app during coverage of the 2012 presidential debates and included it prominently in their team's Cronkite Award entry.

News flash (MEDIA, February 3, 2013): React Labs worked with research/consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates to assess effectiveness of ads during the Super Bowl. This led to some nice coverage both locally and in venues like the New York Times and Yahoo News, as well as the press release being picked up in places like The Wall Street Journal.

News flash (MEDIA, January 23, 2013): I was quoted in Feelings, nothing more than feelings: The measured rise of sentiment analysis in journalism", an article from Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab.

News flash (MEDIA, October 16, 2012): I had a great time appearing on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, co-guesting with Todd Rogers of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, talking about dodges and spin in political debates, in connection with React Labs, the real-time polling platform that I am currently commercializing.

News flash (September 21, 2012): Very happy to report that in a few weeks I will be getting started with a new NSF-sponsored project entitled "Data-Driven, Computational Models for Discovery and Analysis of Framing", in collaboration with Noah Smith (CMU), Amber Boydstun (UC Davis), and Justin Gross (UNC Chapel Hill). We'll be working on developing new foundations for the study of framing in today’s new, data rich environment. I'm also looking forward to seeing my collaborators at the upcoming Harvard conference on New Directions in Analyzing Text As Data (October 5-6), the agenda of which includes a bunch of really interesting looking talks on computational political science and quantitative social science more generally.

News flash (MEDIA, August 6, 2012): Had a good time on Minnesota Public Radio's The Daily Circuit discussing the future of political polling. There's a "Listen" button with the podcast on that page a bit below the title; I joined the conversation around 24:30.

News flash (MEDIA, July 24, 2012): I was quoted a couple of times in an article in American Banker on the use of sentiment analysis in the financial industry to deepen understanding of customers.

News flash (MEDIA, June 14, 2012):The Spring 2012 issue of University of Maryland's Terp Magazine includes a short piece on React Labs, the mobile app I've been developing during my sabbatical for collecting data on real-time reactions during events such as political debates. In addition, a June 14 Institutional Investor article opens with some observations I made to the reporter about the use of social media language analysis for assessing sentiment in the context of stock market trading.

News flash (May 31, 2012): I presented in an NIH Videocast on "Rare Diseases: The challenges presented by Biospecimens, Patient Registries, Electronic Heath Record and Bioethics"; you can see the video here starting at 51:40. (Captions text is available here.)

News flash (April 26, 2012):Very happy to report that a new project in computational political science has received funding from the National Science Foundation. This collaboration with computer scientist Noah Smith and political scientists Amber Boydstun and Justin Gross will develop new computational modeling methods, grounded in data-driven computational linguistics, aimed at improving the scientific understanding of how issues are framed by political elites, the media, and the public.

News flash (April 23-24, 2012):I participated in a fascinating workshop at the National Institutes of Health on Natural Language Processing: State of the Art, Future Directions and Applications for Enhancing Clinical Decision-Making. I'm posting my slides here.

News flash (MEDIA, April 17, 2012): I've just discovered that an article in HealthLeaders Media entitled Are EMRs Killing the Clinical Narrative? covered my SXSWi talk (slides, audio) and it appears to have stirred up some interesting discussion. Which is great, since that's exactly what it was designed for.

News flash (April 10, 2012): CodeRyte, a company I helped start up and still advise, has been acquired by 3M. CodeRyte is a leading provider of natural language processing solutions in healthcare.

News flash (March 27, 2012): I've been invited to attend TEDMED 2012 in DC April 10-13. From the list of delegates and speakers this looks like it should be fascinating. [Update: It was indeed fascinating, wacky, and intellectually stimulating.]

News flash (March 24, 2012): I gave an invited plenary lecture at the 2012 American Association for Applied Linguistics conference, entitled The Linguistics of Spin: A Computational Linguist's Forays into Social Science. During the talk I used myself as a guinea pig for the React Labs live polling app that I'm developing; results can be found here.

News flash (March 19, 2012): Slides for my talk at South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) on Language Technology, Electronic Health Records, and the Clinical Narrative are now available here, with audio here.

News flash (MEDIA, February 11, 2012): I was really pleased to be included among those quoted in discussions by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy", Carl Bialik, about mining Twitter for public opinion, including both the print column and the accompanying blog post.

News flash (MEDIA, January 31, 2012): I had great fun guesting on the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU 88.5 in Washington DC, talking about New Frontiers in Political Polling: Social Media and "Sentiment Analysis". We discussed computational analysis of social media in the context of political campaigns, which was also the topic of a recent posting I did on Language Log called #CompuPolitics; we also briefly discussed the React Labs project, in which collaborators and I are developing a smartphone app for large scale, real-time collection of people's responses during live events like political debates.

News flash (January 26, 2012): Two upcoming talks in cool places, in March. One is a plenary lecture at the 2012 American Association for Applied Linguistics conference, entitled The Linguistics of Spin: A Computational Linguist's Forays into Social Science The other is a slot at South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), on EHRs, NLP and the Future of Clinical Narrative.

News flash (November 7, 2011): I'm in the Bay Area to give a talk today at Google on crowdsourcing and translation, to kick off a new Google-funded collaboration involving me, Ben Bederson, and Chris Callison-Burch that we're calling "Translate the World". Tomorrow I will be giving the keynote talk at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, a technology/business event focused on, yes, sentiment analysis.

News flash (MEDIA, November 3, 2011): Interviewed by New Scientist for their story on Siri.

News flash (MEDIA, June 28, 2011): Nice mention of my work with Ben Bederson and students on monolingual translation crowdsourcing in Jim Giles, New Scientist, Issue 2818, The man-machine: Harnessing humans in a hive mind.

News flash (June 28, 2011): I've just finished two invited talks on "Computer Assisted Coding and Beyond: An Academic's Adventures with Clinical Natural Language Processing in the Real World", one at the ACL/HLT 2011 BioNLP Workshop, and the other at the National Library of Medicine.

News flash (March 30, 2011): I am delighted to report that a student poster presented by Yakov Kronrod (Linguistics), featuring work by Yakov, Chang Hu (CS), Olivia Buzek (CS and Linguistics undergrad), and Alexander J. Quinn (CS), has been named the winning poster in the Math, Technology, and Engineering category at the 2011 AAAS Student Poster Competition. The poster, entitled Using Monolingual Crowds to Improve Translation, reported on work done in the context of a project on crowdsourcing and translation led by Ben Bederson and me, which also got a nice mention in a recent article in New Scientist.

News flash (March 28, 2011):My wife, Rebecca Resnik, a child psychologist, did a nice interview on the DC 10 o'clock news (Fox)

News flash (MEDIA, February 2011): My former Ph.D. student Adam Lopez and I were both quoted in a February 25 article in New Scientist, "Crowdsourced translations get the word out from Libya".

News flash (February 2011): Noah Smith and I gave a presentation on text analysis at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) in March.

News flash (February 2011): I'm going to be a plenary speaker at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in 2012.

News flash (MEDIA, June 2010): Reporter Joel Rose featured interviews with me, Judith Klavans, and Rob Munro in his NPR story this morning, based on the University of Maryland Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Translation that Ben Bederson and I co-organized. The workshop was held on June 10-11, 2010 and featured a truly amazing list of speakers and participants.

News flash (April 2010): New, official release of Gibbs Sampling for the Uninitiated. This technical report replaces our unpublished manuscript, Version 0.3, October 2009. It contains a number of corrections.

News flash (MEDIA, December 2009): My comments on IBM's n.Fluent project appeared in an article in IEEE Computing Now.

News flash (December 2009): The University of Maryland Death Penalty Corpus is now available.

News flash (October 2009): The project with Ben Bederson on translation as a collaborative process has now also received NSF sponsorship in addition to the support from a Google Research Award. The project is blending ideas from machine translation, human computer-interfaces, and distributed human computation ("crowdsourcing") in order to find ways to achieve low cost, high quality translation by taking advantage of monolingual humans in a computer-assisted translation protocol. Ben gave a Google tech talk about the project which is available on YouTube.

News flash (MEDIA, August 2009): Much to my surprise, I was recently listed at #82 on the Future Health 100, a list of "the most creative and influential innovators working in healthcare today" at healthspottr.com. This is in connection with my work with CodeRyte Inc. on using natural language processing to improve medical coding, an expensive and labor intensive bottleneck in the U.S. healthcare system for which there is a severe shortage of human coders.

News flash (December 2008): I have just added What kind of student are you looking for? to my FAQ for prospective students.

News flash (MEDIA, November 2008): Brief interview on Federal News Radio discussing cloud computing and its relevance to language technology.

News flash (MEDIA, October 2008): Press release on a new project!

News flash (September 2008): Speaking of new projects, Alec Jay Resnik (we're calling him Jay) was born last week! Everyone's doing fine. I'm not taking any official time off, though I may be a bit less responsive than usual to e-mail for the next few weeks.

News flash (May 2008): Becky's just started moderating the Parenting forum on medhelp.org, a site devoted to giving people access to health care providers with expertise in particular topics (organized by forums--e.g. cardiology, pediatrics etc.)

News flash (May 2008): I've just graduated two new PhDs!

News flash (Feb 2008): What happened to my hand?

News flash (June 2007): The Czech-English machine translation system submitted by my student Chris Dyer was the best performer, for all evaluation measures, in the shared task for that language pair at the ACL-2007 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT-2007). [details]

News flash (June 2007): Becky and I just celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary, and last November my parents celebrated their 50th!

News flash (November 21 2005): Harry Scott Resnik was born at 7:23am today, weighing 7 pounds, 5.2 ounces. Everything went remarkably smoothly and the whole family is doing great.

News flash (November 21, 2005): As of November 21, we have a new laptop accessory.

News flash (MEDIA, July 2005): The Linguist's Search Engine now supports Chinese, and there is also source code (alpha release) and a great deal of new documentation. See also a nice mention in an article in the Economist last January.

News flash (July 2005): Our statistical machine translation team turned in a great performance at NIST's 2005 Machine Translation Evaluation. The paper on the statistical translation model, by postdoc David Chiang, won the Best Paper award at the ACL 2005 conference.

News flash (September 2004): Toto, I have a feeling we're not on sabbatical anymore. Sigh.