Daniel Khashabi, an assistant professor of computer science and a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing and the Data Science and AI Institute, has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER Award, which recognizes the excellence of early-career faculty members with the potential for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
Khashabi’s work focuses on the computational foundations of intelligent behavior within various mediums of communication, particularly natural language. This involves developing formalisms that characterize and result in natural language processing systems that are capable of understanding and reasoning with—and about—an uncertain world while being general enough to handle a broader space of contexts.
His five-year NSF CAREER award, “Reasoning-Centered AI for Scientific Discovery,” will support the development of AI systems capable of helping researchers uncover hidden connections across scientific literature—systems that can recognize structural parallels between ideas in different domains. By helping researchers identify promising new directions more quickly, this project has the potential to accelerate discoveries that directly improve quality of life.