Andrew McCallum is a professor in the

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

department at

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

. His primary specialties are in

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

information extraction Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...

information integration Information integration (II) is the merging of information from heterogeneous sources with differing conceptual, contextual and typographical representations. It is used in data mining and consolidation of data from unstructured or semi-structured ...

, and

social network analysis Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked structures in terms of ''nodes'' (individual actors, people, or things within the network) a ...

Career

McCallum graduated

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sou ...

from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

in 1989. He completed his Ph.D. at

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The University of Roc ...

in 1995 under the supervision of Dana H. Ballard. He was then a postdoctoral fellow, working with

Sebastian Thrun Sebastian Thrun (born May 14, 1967) is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Co ...

and

Tom M. Mitchell Tom Michael Mitchell (born August 9, 1951) is an American computer scientist and the Founders University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He is a founder and former Chair of the Machine Learning Department at CMU. Mitchell is known ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. From 1998 to 2000 he was a Research Scientist and Research Coordinator at

Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center Also known as Just Research, Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center (JPRC) was a late-1990s computer science research laboratory in Pittsburgh, loosely associated with Carnegie Mellon University. Its director was Dr. Scott Fahlman. During its relati ...

. From 2000 to 2002 was Vice President of Research and Development at WhizBang Labs, and Director of its

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

office. Since 2002, he worked as a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2020, he also joined

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

as a part-time research scientist. He was elected as a

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

in 2009, and as an

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

in 2017. From 2014 to 2017 he was the President of International Machine Learning Society (IMLS), which organizes the

International Conference on Machine Learning The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the leading international academic conference in machine learning. Along with NeurIPS and ICLR, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artifici ...

. He is also the director of the Center for Data Science at UMass, leading a new partnership with the Chan and Zuckerberg Initiative. In 2018, the initiative made an initial grant of 5.5 million to the center, supporting research to facilitate new ways for scientists to explore and discover research articles.

Main contributions

In collaboration with John D. Lafferty and Fernando Pereira, McCallum developed

conditional random field Conditional random fields (CRFs) are a class of statistical modeling methods often applied in pattern recognition and machine learning and used for structured prediction. Whereas a classifier predicts a label for a single sample without consid ...

s, first described in a paper presented at the

(ICML). In 2011 this research paper won the ICML "Test of Time" (10-year best paper) award. McCallum has written several widely used

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software toolkits for machine learning, natural language processing and other text processing, including Rainbow,

Mallet (software project) MALLET is a Java "Machine Learning for Language Toolkit". Description MALLET is an integrated collection of Java code useful for statistical natural language processing, document classification, cluster analysis, information extraction, topic ...

, and FACTORIE. In addition, he was instrumental in publishing the Enron Corpus, a large collection of emails that has been used as a basis for a number of academic studies of social networking and language. McCallum instigated and directs the nonprofit project OpenReview.net, an online platform that aims to promote openness in scientific communication, particularly the peer review process, by providing a flexible cloud-based web interface and underlying database API.

References

External links

Andrew McCallum's home page
Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Machine learning researchers Artificial intelligence researchers American computer scientists Dartmouth College alumni University of Rochester alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Natural language processing researchers {{compu-scientist-stub