Rada Mihalcea named new council member for CRA Computing Community Consortium

Rada Mihalcea, the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science, has been appointed as one of six new members on the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council, which is affiliated with the Computing Research Association (CRA).

The mission of the CCC is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. The CCC conducts activities that strengthen the computing research community, articulate compelling research visions, and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges. The CCC communicates the importance of those visions to policymakers, government and industry stakeholders, the public, and the research community itself.

Beginning July 1, the new council members will each serve three-year terms. The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading the CCC’s visioning programs.

Mihalcea is the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, computational social sciences, and multimodal language processing. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2009 and Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2011, and a general chair for North American ACL 2015 and *SEM 2019. She directs multiple diversity and mentorship initiatives, including Girls Encoded and the ACL Year-Round Mentorship program. She currently serves as ACL Past  President. 

She is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009), and was named an ACM Fellow (2019) and an AAAI Fellow (2021). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She has received two awards recognizing papers with lasting impact, including from AAAI and ACM ICMI.

In addition to Mihalcea, the appointees include Randal Burns (Johns Hopkins University),

David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Raj Rajaraman (Northeastern University), Matthew Turk (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago), Pam Wisniewski (University of Central Florida).