Andrew McCallum

Last updated
Andrew McCallum
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Dartmouth College
University of Rochester [1]
Known for Conditional random field
AwardsICML Test of Time (2011)
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
InstitutionsWhizBang Labs
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Google Research
Doctoral advisor Dana H. Ballard [2]

Andrew McCallum is a professor in the computer science department at University of Massachusetts Amherst. [3] His primary specialties are in machine learning, natural language processing, information extraction, information integration, and social network analysis. [4]

Contents

Career

McCallum graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1989. He completed his Ph.D. at University of Rochester in 1995 under the supervision of Dana H. Ballard. He was then a postdoctoral fellow, working with Sebastian Thrun and Tom M. Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon University. From 1998 to 2000 he was a Research Scientist and Research Coordinator at Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center. From 2000 to 2002 was Vice President of Research and Development at WhizBang Labs, and Director of its Pittsburgh office. Since 2002, he worked as a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2020, he also joined Google as a part-time research scientist.

He was elected as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence [5] in 2009, and as an Association for Computing Machinery [6] in 2017. From 2014 to 2017 he was the President of International Machine Learning Society (IMLS), [7] which organizes the International Conference on Machine Learning. He is also the director of the Center for Data Science at UMass, leading a new partnership with the Chan and Zuckerberg Initiative. In 2018, the initiative made an initial grant of 5.5 million to the center, supporting research to facilitate new ways for scientists to explore and discover research articles. [8]

Main contributions

In collaboration with John D. Lafferty and Fernando Pereira, McCallum developed conditional random fields, first described in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). [9] In 2011 this research paper won the ICML "Test of Time" (10-year best paper) award. [10]

McCallum has written several widely used [11] open-source software toolkits for machine learning, natural language processing and other text processing, including Rainbow, [12] Mallet (software project), and FACTORIE. [13] In addition, he was instrumental in publishing the Enron Corpus, a large collection of emails that has been used as a basis for a number of academic studies of social networking and language.

McCallum instigated and directs the nonprofit project OpenReview.net, an online platform that aims to promote openness in scientific communication, particularly the peer review process, by providing a flexible cloud-based web interface and underlying database API. [14]

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Conditional random fields (CRFs) are a class of statistical modeling methods often applied in pattern recognition and machine learning and used for structured prediction. Whereas a classifier predicts a label for a single sample without considering "neighbouring" samples, a CRF can take context into account. To do so, the predictions are modelled as a graphical model, which represents the presence of dependencies between the predictions. What kind of graph is used depends on the application. For example, in natural language processing, "linear chain" CRFs are popular, for which each prediction is dependent only on its immediate neighbours. In image processing, the graph typically connects locations to nearby and/or similar locations to enforce that they receive similar predictions.

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References

  1. "Bio for Andrew McCallum". Archived from the original on 4 June 2010. Retrieved 2010-05-31.
  2. "The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Andrew McCallum". Archived from the original on 6 May 2010. Retrieved 2010-05-31.
  3. "Faculty Directory". cs.umass.edu. Archived from the original on 4 June 2010. Retrieved 2010-05-31.
  4. "Elected AAAI Fellows" . Retrieved 2010-05-31.
  5. "AAAI Fellows Program".
  6. "All Award Winners". awards.acm.org. Retrieved 2017-12-22.
  7. "IMLS Board". machinelearning.org. Retrieved 19 March 2015. President-Elect Andrew McCallum
  8. "UMass Center for Data Science Partners with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to Accelerate Science and Medicine". umass.edu. Retrieved 2018-01-26.
  9. Lafferty, J.; McCallum, A.; Pereira, F.C.N. (2001). "Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data". International Conference on Machine Learning. pp. 79–87.
  10. "Test-of-Time Award ICML'11". ICML. 2011. Retrieved 15 December 2014. John D. Lafferty, Andrew McCallum, Fernando C. N. Pereira. Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data.
  11. "Google Scholar search for +mccallum +rainbow +software" . Retrieved 2010-05-31.
  12. "Rainbow". Archived from the original on 26 May 2010. Retrieved 2010-05-31.
  13. "FACTORIE" . Retrieved 2014-05-20.
  14. "OpenReview".