| 1 | Name: | Dr. Kathleen McKeown | |
| Institution: | Columbia University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2022 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 107 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1954 | ||
Kathleen McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She was also the Founding Director of Columbia's Data Science Institute, a position she held from July 2012 to June 2017. She served as Department Chair from 1998-2003 and was Vice Dean for Research for the School of Engineering and Applied Science for two years. Before arriving at Columbia, she received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. McKeown has transformed the Natural Language Processing field, pioneering automatic text generation, which she introduced in her Ph.D. thesis. She created the field of automatic text summarization, introducing multi-document summarization to combine information about a single topic from diverse sources, developing NewsBlaster to summarize news for the government after 9/11. She also developed methods for generating medical explanations and identifying social posts in South Chicago likely to lead to violence for social workers' use. At Columbia she was the first female tenured in the Engineering School, started the Women in Computer Sciences Student Group, and was the first female Computer Sciences Chair McKeown received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, a National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women in 1991, and the Anita Borg Woman of Vision Award for Innovation in 2010. She was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics from 1992 to 1993, has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery since 2003, a member of the United States National Academies of Science, since 2018, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2019. McKeown was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |||