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Bonnie Dorr

Dr. Bonnie Dorr

  • Position: Associate Director & Senior Research Scientist
  • Department: IHMC
  • Office Location: Ocala
  • bdorr@ihmc.us
  • Campus: 352.387.3050

Biography

Dr. Bonnie J. Dorr, a leading researcher in the field of natural language processing, is joining the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) as an associate director and senior research scientist at IHMC’s Ocala facility.

Natural language processing is a growing research field at IHMC, and Dr. Dorr’s expertise is at the cutting edge. Her extensive research and project management experience includes deep language understanding and semantics, large-scale multilingual processing, and summarization. She and her colleagues have carried out seminal work in cross-language divergence detection, machine translation, paraphrasing and automatic evaluation metrics.

Dr. Dorr joins IHMC from the University of Maryland, where she is Professor Emerita in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Department of Computer Science. She was an associate dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences, and co-founded the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory. She was also principal scientist for two years at the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence.

In 2011 she became a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), overseeing research in human language technology. Her significant DARPA projects include Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT), Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT), Multilingual Automatic Document Classification, Analysis, and Translation (MADCAT), and Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS).

She holds both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a Bachelor’s from Boston University. She is a Sloan Fellow, a NSF Presidential Faculty (PECASE) Fellow, and a former president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She has served on the Executive Council of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She was elected AAAI Fellow in 2013, was graduated in the Class of XXXIII of Leadership Florida in 2015, and was elected ACL Fellow in 2016.