Fernando Pereira, University of Pennsylvania

Fernando Pereira is the Andrew and Debra Rachleff Professor and chair of the department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1982. Before joining Penn, he held industrial research and management positions at SRI International, at AT&T Labs, where he led the machine learning and information retrieval research department from September 1995 to April 2000, and at WhizBang Labs, a Web information extraction company. His main research interests are in machine-learnable models of language and other natural sequential data such as biological sequences. He made major contributions to advances in finite-state models for speech and text processing now in everyday industrial use. He has 80 research publications on computational linguistics, speech recognition, machine learning, bioinformatics, and logic programming, and several issued and pending patents on speech recognition, language processing, and human-computer interfaces. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1991 for his contributions to computational linguistics and logic programming, and he is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.