First Recipient of the Newell Chair in Computer Science
--Memorandum: Office of the President, 14 September 1997

We are extremely pleased to announce that Dr Jaime G. Carbonell, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Machine Translation (CMT), is the first recipient of the Allen Newell Chair in Computer Science.

Dr. Newell, who died in 1992, played a pivotal role in creating Carnegie Mellon's Department (later School) of Computer Science and elevating it to world class status. He helped to found the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science, and received the National Medal of Science for his pioneering work.

Dr. Carbonell has been a member of the Carnegie Mellon faculty since 1979. He founded the CMT in 1986, and under his leadership, it has grown to one of the largest centers of its kind in the world, with an annual budget of over $3 million. Dr. Carbonell believes work at the center will help to break down the world's language barriers and enhance international trade, medicine, tourism and education. Among other things, CMT researchers have developed the Janus speech-to-speech translation system and the Lycos engine and Catalog of the Internet. They also have developed technology capable of translating technical manuals into as many as 11 languages.

Dr. Carbonell's personal research interests span several areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, machine translation, analogical reasoning, high-performance planning, knowledge representation, very-large-scale knowledge bases and integrated complex systems.

At present, he is concentrating on two projects--Prodigy and Kant. The former is an integrated computational architecture for planning, problem solving and machine learning in complex domains. The latter is an interlingual system for accurate, knowledge-based machine translation, where development is being carried through to deployment at large customer sites.

Dr. Carbonell is also focusing on education. He is starting a new program on language technologies, including masters' degrees in machine translation, speech and information retrieval. He is also editing a textbook series titled ~Foundations of Artificial Intelligence.'

Dr. Carbonell earned bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. He holds master's and doctor's degrees in computer science from Yale University, which he received in 1976 and 1978, respectively.

Dr. Carbonell has written some 170 technical papers, and edited and authored books on machine learning, automated planning and machine translation. He is a founder and director of Carnegie Group Inc, a leading artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems applications company.

He served on the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Advisory Committee and is a past president of C-STAR-II, the international organization for speech-to-speech translation. He is a member of the National German Artificial Intelligence Lab (DFKI) Scientific Advisory Board and several editorial boards, including that of the Artificial Intelligence Journal. He has also served as chair of SIGART, the Association for Computing Machinery~s special interest group on artificial intelligence. He was executive editor of the Machine Learning Journal. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and has served on its executive council.

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