Noah Smith, an expert in natural language processing (NLP) and computational social science, will join UW CSE next year. He is currently Finmeccania Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science, Language Technologies Institute, at Carnegie Mellon University.
Noah is widely regarded as a leading researcher in NLP, known for significant contributions in both core algorithms and innovative applications. His honors include a Best Paper Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics for work in syntactic parsing and a Five-Year Award from the Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation for his work on feature-rich machine translation. He is also leading the way in bridging NLP and social science with his recent efforts to, for example, use Twitter posts to model geographic variation in word usage, predict public opinion without polling, and automatically measure consumer confidence.
Noah received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2006, and B.S. and B.A. degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics, respectively, from the University of Maryland in 2001.
Noah joins CSE along with Yejin Choi, currently a faculty member at SUNY Stony Brook and also an expert in natural language processing (more details here). The addition of Noah and Yejin to Luke Zettlemoyer and others already on campus creates a world-class NLP group at the University of Washington.
Welcome Noah!