Julia Hirschberg Elected to the European Academy of Engineering and the Austrian Academy of Engineering

Julia Hirschberg, Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering, has been elected to both the European Academy of Engineering (EurAE) and the Austrian Academy of Engineering (AAE), recognizing her decades of leadership and innovation in speech and language technologies, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.

Election to the European Academy of Engineering is one of the organization's highest distinctions, honoring individuals who have made sustained and outstanding contributions to the advancement of engineering and technology through research, innovation, and leadership.

The Austrian Academy of Engineering brings together internationally recognized researchers and innovators whose work has significantly advanced engineering and technology. Election to the academy recognizes scientific excellence and lasting contributions to the field.

Hirschberg's research has transformed the field of computational linguistics, particularly the study of prosody—the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech—and its applications in text-to-speech synthesis, spoken dialogue systems, emotion recognition, and deceptive speech detection. Her work has helped shape technologies that enable computers to better understand and generate natural human speech.

These latest honors add to Hirschberg's long list of distinctions, including election to the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and fellowships in the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Computational Linguistics, the International Speech Communication Association, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Hirschberg, who is also a member of the Data Science Institute, received her PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining Columbia Engineering in 2002, she spent nearly two decades at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs–Research, where she served as a member of Technical Staff and later as department head, founding the Human-Computer Interface Research Department. At Columbia, she served as chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2012 to 2018, helping guide the department through a period of significant growth while continuing her groundbreaking research in speech and language technologies.