Rada Mihalcea named Fellow of the ACM

Prof. Rada Mihalcea has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This title is the organization’s most prestigious member grade, recognizing the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology.

Mihalcea is recognized for her outstanding research on natural language and multi-modal interaction among humans and between humans and computational systems. She works to identify deception, emotion, and humor in text and interpersonal interactions. She focuses on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences.

Her recent and ongoing research includes analyzing text to identify a person or group’s core values, developing computational methodologies that can assist counselors working on substance abuse, medication adherence, and other behavior changes, and studying chat histories to identify characteristics about how a person communicates and their unique social behaviors.

In addition, Mihalcea is committed to service work in support of diversity in computer science. She advises the group Girls Encoded, with whom she organizes a number of events and programs to increase the number of women in the computing field. She also works in leadership roles in her research community, currently serving as Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in CSE and Vice-President elect for the Association for Computational Linguistics.