Barbara Grosz

Collaborator

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Barbara J. Grosz is Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Dean of Science of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Professor Grosz is the author of several seminal papers in discourse processing and in collaborative systems. She developed the discourse component of several natural-language processing systems, including some of the earliest computer dialogue systems, and is widely regarded as having established the research field of computational modeling of discourse. She has also published papers on natural-language interfaces to databases. Her work on models of collaboration helped establish that field of inquiry and has provided the framework for several collaborative multi-agent systems. With colleagues at Harvard, she has developed several collaborative interfaces for human-computer communication.

Professor Grosz is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the ACM, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the UC Berkeley Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumna Award in 1997, the AAAI Distinguished Service Award in 1999, and the IJCAI Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award in 2001. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she was Director of the Natural Language program at SRI International and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Language and Information. Professor Grosz received an A.B. in Mathematics from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Grosz is also widely respected for her contributions to the advancement of women in science. She chaired the Harvard FAS Standing Committee on the Status of Women when it produced the report, Women in Science at Harvard; Part I: Junior Faculty and Graduate Students (February 1991), and served on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Diversity from 1998-2001. She was recently appointed to chair Harvard's Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering.