McCallum receives faculty awards

For his research contributions to the field of machine learning (ML), Associate Professor Andrew McCallum received the College Outstanding Faculty Research Award at the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) fall convocation.

He also received a highly competitive IBM Faculty Award in recognition of his achievements and work on “High Accuracy Co-reference with Weighted First-order Logic, Resource-bounded Information Gathering, and Social Network Analysis.”  According to IBM, the faculty awards foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those at IBM research, development and services organizations; they also promote courseware and curriculum development that stimulates growth in disciplines and geographical areas that are strategic to IBM and the world.

The NSM outstanding faculty research award was established in 2000 to honor faculty members for their research contributions. Departments make nominations for the faculty awards and the selections are made by the college-wide committee appointed by the NSM Dean. McCallum was selected for this award for his leading research in the field of ML and information extraction (IE).

McCallum specializes in the area of statistical ML.  He was among the first researchers to recognize the emerging challenges and opportunities for applying the technology of ML to the processing of textual information. His work on IE has been at the forefront of this important area and has established him as one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. 

McCallum’s research concerns mining the vast amounts of unstructured text and scientific data found in newswire articles, Web pages, government reports and scientific papers and turning that data into knowledge. He creates probabilistic models that allow computers to search through data and identify patterns based on language.

McCallum has analyzed 16 years of Senate voting records to track how coalitions form based on issues like energy and Social Security, using the language of the legislation. He also analyzed corporate e-mails from Enron to characterize the roles played by various employees and determine how collaboration and communication work.

Mining the vast amount of biological data available to researchers is another area of focus for McCallum. In collaboration with colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, his team recently placed highly in a competition aimed at extracting the names of genes and proteins from bioinformatics articles.

In other activities this year, McCallum traveled to China to give a keynote address at a machine learning conference at Peking University, Beijing, China. He also gave an invited talk at the National Academies of Science “Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium Series,” and he co-organized the Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis held in conjunction with the 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2007). McCallum was appointed to the founding editorial board of Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning (Michael Jordan is editor-in-chief).

McCallum joined the Department in 2002 and was awarded tenure in 2007.