Panel discussion on Careers in NLP

This year NAACL-HLT will feature a plenary panel on Careers in NLP which will take place on Monday, June 3 afternoon.

The 2019 version of this panel recognizes the diversity of NLP careers today. Traditional career paths have typically led NLP researchers into academia, industrial labs, and government agencies. Today, we also see an increase in roles at startup companies and an emerging NLP practitioner role in industry that intersects with software, data, and product.

We are glad to announce that Philip Resnik will return as the panel moderator in 2019. Philip and our panelists (Joel, Judith, Owen and Yunyao) will discuss multiple topics including trends in NLP careers, emerging skills, prominent challenges and opportunities for cross-functional collaboration as an NLP professional in today’s organizations. We hope that the conversations this panel starts will continue beyond this session and shape future experiences of professionals in the NLP field and their mentors.

Make sure you grab your lunch early and come join us at the panel! If you haven’t filled the survey about the careers in NLP panel already, please share the questions and topics you would like to see included in the panel discussion.

Panelists

Judith Klavans

Judith Klavans holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of London. After an interdisciplinary postdoc at MIT between Linguistics, Computer Science, Psychology and Speech, her career has taken place in 10 year chunks spanning industry, academia and government research: first, at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center focusing on computational morphology and text-to-speech synthesis; next, at Columbia University as Director of the Center for Research on Information Access where her research focused on cross-lingual summarization, ML, and building structured data from unstructured input; the most recent decade of her career has been spent between the University of Maryland (Center for Advanced Study of Language and UMIACS), researching the relationship between language and images for museum applications, and the US government overseeing HLT funding and strategic planning. One of her commitments over her entire career has been to help mentor students and colleagues for career opportunities and choices.

Yunyao Li

Yunyao Li is a Senior Manager with IBM Research - Almaden, where she manages the Scalable Knowledge Intelligence department. She is a member of the New Voices program of the American National Academies. She is also a Master Inventor and a member of IBM Academy of Technology. Her expertise is in the interdisciplinary areas of natural language processing, databases, human-computer interaction, and information retrieval. Her contributions in these areas have resulted in over 50 research publications (including a book) and nearly 30 patent filings and been recognized by multiple prestigious awards. She is a founding member of SystemT, a state-of-the-art NLP system currently powering multiple IBM products, and numerous projects. She is also a founding member of Gumshoe, a novel enterprise search engine powering IBM intranet and ibm.com search (2010-2017). She received her PhD and master degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and undergraduate degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Yunyao is also deeply passionate about improving the diversity and inclusion for the STEM field. She currently leads the Almaden Women’s Interest Network Group (AWING) at IBM.

Owen Rambow

Owen Rambow is a research scientist at Elemental Cognition, LLP, focusing on natural language understanding and generation. Specific interests include both the “nuts and bolts” of language, such as morphology and syntax, and how language is actually used in context. Owen received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and then worked at CoGenTex Inc., a startup focusing on nature language generation and at AT&T Labs — Research. Then, for 15 years, Owen was a research scientist at Columbia University. At Columbia, he was part of the Center for Computational Learning Systems. He was co-founder of CADIM, a research group on Arabic natural language processing (NLP), which is licensing state-of-the-art robust NLP tools. His group also released several resources, including a richly annotated version of the Enron email corpus. Owen has published extensively in top conferences and journals. He has served as the Chair of the American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, as program co-chair of the NAACL HLT 2016 conference, and he has served as program committee chair or senior program committee member for many conferences and workshops.

Philip Resnik (Moderator)

Philip Resnik is Professor at University of Maryland, with joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Prior to joining UMD, he was an associate scientist at BBN, a graduate summer intern at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (subsequently awarded an IBM Graduate Fellowship) while at UPenn, and a research scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. In addition, Philip has been a co-founder for several startups, the first of which exited successfully in 2012 (acquired by 3M), and he serves as an advisor to Converseon, SoloSegment, and FiscalNote. Philip’s current NLP research focuses on computational social science, particularly mental health: he was a co-founder of the CLPsych workshop series, and his main 2018-2019 sabbatical project, supported by an Amazon Machine Learning Research Award, involves building a secure mental health data enclave to facilitate shared research access to sensitive datasets. He has also been using his sabbatical to begin a new project in computational cognitive neuroscience.

Joel Tetreault

Joel Tetreault is Director of Research at Grammarly where he works on the research and productization of NLP tools and components for the next generation of intelligent writing assistance systems. Prior to joining Grammarly, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs, Senior Principal Manager at Nuance Communications, Inc., and Senior Managing Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service. Joel recently finished a six year stint as NAACL Treasurer and was a long-time organizer of the Building Educational Application workshop series. He is often found writing papers, chairing and reviewing for tracks such as Discourse, NLP Applications and Style.