Kathleen McKeown

Current Positions

Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University
Director of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering
Director of NSF North East Big Data Hub

Website

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kathy/

---

Biography

Kathleen McKeown is Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where she is also Director of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. A long-time researcher in information extraction and natural language processing, she is currently the lead investigator of the North East Big Data Hub, a new multi-institutional collaboration on big data research with major concentration in Health, Energy, Finance, Cities/Regions, Discovery Science, and Education.

---

Title

At the Intersection of Data Science and Language

---

Abstract

Data science holds the promise to solve many of society’s most pressing challenges, but much of the necessary data is locked within the volumes of unstructured data on the web including language, speech and video. In this talk, I will describe how data science approaches are being used in research projects that draw from language data along a continuum from fact to fiction. I will present research on predicting the future impact of a scientific concept—represented as a technical term—based on the information available in recently published research articles, research on learning from knowledge of past disasters, as seen through the lens of the media and on the use of data science in understanding subjective, personal narratives. In these projects we will see how data drawn from the web and semantics play a role.