Candace Lee (Candy) Sidner is an American computer scientist whose research has applied

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

and

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 ...

to problems in personal information management,

intelligent user interface An intelligent user interface (Intelligent UI, IUI, or sometimes Interface Agent) is a user interface (UI) that involves some aspect of artificial intelligence (AI or computational intelligence). There are many modern examples of IUIs, the most famo ...

s, and human–robot interaction. She is a research professor of computer science at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a former president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Education and career

Sidner majored in mathematics at Kalamazoo College, graduating in 1971. She earned a master's degree in computer science at the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...

in 1975, and completed a Ph.D. in computer science in 1979 at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. Her dissertation, ''Towards A Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse'', was supervised by Jonathan Allen. She worked as a researcher for Bolt Beranek and Newman from 1979 to 1989, and continued to work in industry for the

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

(1989 to 1993), the

Lotus Development Corporation Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

(1993 to 2000),

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) is a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Electric US Holdings, Inc., which, in its turn, is the principal subsidiary of Mitsubishi Electric in the United States. MERL is the North American arm of the Corpora ...

(2000 to 2007), and

BAE Systems BAE Systems plc (BAE) is a British multinational arms, security, and aerospace company based in London, England. It is the largest defence contractor in Europe, and ranked the seventh-largest in the world based on applicable 2021 revenues. ...

(2007 to 2010). She took her present position as a research professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2009. She served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1989.

Recognition

Sidner was named a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1991. In 2013, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics, "for seminal contributions to discourse focus and collaborative dialog".

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sidner, Candace Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists Natural language processing researchers Kalamazoo College alumni University of Pittsburgh alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Worcester Polytechnic Institute faculty Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Presidents of the Association for Computational Linguistics