The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has elected Claire Cardie, associate dean for education in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering and professor of computer science and information science, and Kilian Weinberger, professor of computer science, as AAAI Fellows for 2024.
Each year, AAAI selects a cohort of fellows “who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence,” often over the course of a decade. Cardie and Weinberger are among this year’s 12 AAAI Fellows who will be celebrated at an awards ceremony during the AAAI-24 meeting, held Feb. 22 to 25 in Vancouver.
Cardie is being honored for her research on natural language processing (NLP), in which she aims to develop algorithms and systems that make it easier to locate, understand and extract information from text on the internet. Her group employs machine learning (ML) techniques, such as neural networks, as a modeling tool. They develop techniques both to accomplish large-scale NLP tasks and to address underlying theoretical problems in analyzing human language.
“I am honored and excited to join the growing cohort of AAAI fellows in the computer science department,” Cardie said.
Previously, Cardie was elected a AAAS Fellow in 2022, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2019 and a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2015. She was also a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award and the Ralph S. Watts College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award.
Weinberger is recognized for his contribution to ML and deep learning research. Applications of his work include autonomous driving, computer vision, Gaussian processes and the development of more cost-effective ML systems.
“I am very honored,” Weinberger said.
In addition to the current honor, Weinberger was a Blavatnik National Awards Finalist in 2021. He received the Daniel M Lazar '29 Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016 and an NSF CAREER award in 2012. Weinberger is also the current president of the International Machine Learning Society.
Cardie and Weinberger are the newest Cornell Bowers CIS faculty to be named AAAI Fellows. They join Thorsten Joachims, professor of computer science and information science; Lillian Lee, the Charles Roy Davis Professor of computer science and professor of information science; Carla Gomes, the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science; Bart Selman, professor of computer science; and Joseph Halpern, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering and professor of computer science.
By Patricia Waldron, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.