Regina Barzilay, Computer Science PhD ’03, Named Inaugural Winner of AAAI Squirrel AI Award

Regina Barzilay, a former PhD student of Computer Science Professor Kathy McKeown, has been named the inaugural recipient of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s new Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. The $1 million award is given to honor individuals whose work in the field has had a transformative impact on society.

Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is being recognized for her work developing machine learning models to develop antibiotics and other drugs, and to detect and diagnose breast cancer at early stages. She won a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship for her work in developing machine-learning methods that enable computers to process and analyze vast amounts of human language data.