Dr. Mitch Marcus

Mitch Marcus is RCA Professor of Artificial Intelligence Emeritus in the Department of Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was also professor of linguistics. He graduated from Harvard University in linguistics and applied math in 1972; received his Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1978; and was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories before coming to Penn in 1987. His early work focused on computational models of human syntactic processing and was responsible in the early 1990s for the Penn Treebank Project, which has been widely used for the past 30 years to train natural language processing systems using statistical machine learning. He also ran a multi-university team investigating natural language interfaces for autonomous robots and has developed cognitively plausible models for automatically learning linguistic structure.   He is a fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence, a founding fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics and served for more than a decade as chair of the advisory board of the Center of Excellence in Human Language Technologies at Johns Hopkins University. He has served as chair of Penn’s Computer and Information Science Department; chair of the Penn Faculty Senate; chair of the Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute, which recommends Benjamin Franklin Medal Laureates; as well as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. He is currently chair-elect of the Penn Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty (PASEF).   Mitch is a longtime member of Minyan Dorshei Derekh and a past president of Germantown Jewish Centre. He currently spends time studying Zohar, various areas of mathematics and learning many things from five granddaughters.