Barbara J Grosz

Barbara Grosz's contributions to natural language processing center around the nature of discourse structure in language. Her research shows how discourse has identifiable structure at least as rich as that found at the sentence level, demonstrating the influence of discourse structure on such varied phenomena as forms of reference, intonational patterns, syntactic form, and cue-phrase selection. Within the area of multi-agent systems, Professor Grosz's research centers around the development of conceptual and architectural constructs that support joint action in multi-agent collaboration. She has contributed theoretical results as well as implemented systems, such as Colored Trails, that have been adopted by many others for their research. This work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on theories and results from economics, philosophy, psychology, and core computer science.

Professor Grosz has played a leadership role within the field of artificial intelligence, serving as AAAI President, IJCAI Chair, and on the governing board of AAMAS. She has also had a profound effect on interdisciplinary institutions with which she has been affiliated. She was a co-founder in 1983 of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, a joint effort of Stanford University, SRI, and Xerox PARC, which became a premier institution in the interdisciplinary areas of computational linguistics and symbolic systems. As the first dean of science at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Grosz developed a highly successful science program that fosters engagements with scientific communities at Harvard and attracts leading laboratory scientists as well as theorists from all scientific fields and from all parts of the world to Radcliffe's fellowship program. As dean of the Radcliffe Institute, she has been working with faculty from other Harvard schools to build multidisciplinary collaborations crossing the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences.