Rada Mihalcea Explained

Rada Mihalcea
Birth Place:Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Known For:
Education:Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (1992), Southern Methodist University (1999, 2001), Oxford University (2010)
Occupation:Professor at University of Michigan

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has made contributions to natural language processing, multimodal processing, and computational social science. With Paul Tarau, she is the co-inventor of TextRank Algorithm,[1] which is widely used for text summarization.

Career

Mihalcea has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Southern Methodist University (2001) and a Ph.D. in Linguistics, Oxford University (2010).[2] In 2017 she was named Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at University of Michigan, Computer Science and Engineering. In 2018, Mihalcea was elected as new VP for the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she also leads the Language and Information Technologies (LIT) Lab.[3]

A prolific researcher, Mihalcea has authored or coauthored over 350 articles since 1998 on topics ranging from semantic analysis of text to lie detection.[4] Her work has been cited over 40,000 times on Google Scholar, which made her one of the most cited scholars in Multimodal Interation and Computational Social Science.[5]

In 2008, Mihalcea received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)[6] She is an ACM Fellow (since 2019) and AAAI Fellow (since 2021).

Mihalcea is an outspoken promoter of diversity in computer science. She also supports an expansion of the traditional analysis of educational success, which tends to focus on academic behaviour, to include student life, personality and background outside of the classroom.[7] Mihalcea leads Girls Encoded, a program designed to develop the pipeline of women in computer science as well as to retain the women who have entered into the program.[8] [9] [10]

Awards

Research

Mihalcea is known for her research in natural language processing, multimodal processing, computational social sciences. In a collaboration she leads at the University of Michigan, Mihalcea has created software that can detect human lying.[14] In a study of video clips of high profile court cases, a computer was more accurate at detecting deception than human judges.[15] [16] [17]

Mihalcea's lie-detection software uses machine learning techniques to analyze video clips of actual trials.[18] In her 2015 study, the team used clips from The Innocence Project, a national organization that works to reexamine cases where individuals were tried without the benefit of DNA testing with the aim of exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals.[19] After identifying common human gestures, they transcribed the audio from the video clips of trials and analyzed how often subjects labeled deceptive used various words and phrases. The system was 75% accurate in identifying which subjects were deceptive among 120 videos.[19] [20] That puts Mihalcea’s algorithm on par with the most commonly accepted form of lie detection, polygraph tests, which are roughly 85 percent accurate when testing guilty people and 56 percent accurate when testing the innocent.[21] She notes there are still improvements to be made — in particular to account for cultural and demographic differences.[19] A possibly unique advantage of Mihalcea's study was the real world, high stakes nature of the footage analyzed in the study. In laboratory experiments, it is difficult to create a setting that motivates people to truly lie.[22]

In 2018, Mihalcea and her collaborators worked on an algorithm-based system that identifies linguistic cues in fake news stories. It successfully found fakes up to 76% of the time, compared to a human success rate of 70%.[23]

Publications

Books

Journals and conferences

Personal life

Mihalcea was born in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she attended the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.

She can speak Romanian, English, Italian, and French.

Mihalcea has two children - Zara (b. 2009) and Caius (b. 2013). They were both born in Dallas, Texas.

She is married to an associate professor of engineering at the University of Michigan–Flint - Mihai Burzo. They met while they were both completing Ph.D.s at Southern Methodist University in 2001[24] and have often collaborated on research,[25] such as the 2015 study on lie detection.

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: TextRank: Bringing Order into Texts . . 2024-03-17.
  2. Web site: The Language of Humor, PhD Dissertation . . 2021-02-13.
  3. Web site: Language Information and Technologies. lit.eecs.umich.edu. 2019-03-07.
  4. Web site: Rada Mihalcea . . 2024-03-16.
  5. Web site: Rada Mihalcea . . 2024-03-17.
  6. Web site: President Honors Outstanding Early-Career Scientists . . 2017-08-30.
  7. Web site: U Michigan MIDAS Program Backs Student Success Research . Campus Technology . 2016-06-23.
  8. Web site: Girls Encoded. girlsencoded.eecs.umich.edu. 2019-03-07.
  9. Web site: Making a difference for women in academia. University of Michigan EECS. en. 2019-03-07.
  10. Web site: A champion for women in computer science. University of Michigan EECS. en. 2019-03-07.
  11. Web site: Sarah Goddard Power Award. The University Record. 2019-03-07.
  12. Web site: Carol Hollenshead Award Center for the Education of Women University of Michigan. www.cew.umich.edu. 2019-03-07.
  13. Web site: President Honors Outstanding Early-Career Scientists NSF - National Science Foundation. www.nsf.gov. 2019-03-07.
  14. Web site: Researchers Develop New Lie-Detecting Software . Topnews.in . 2015-12-16.
  15. Web site: Can you spot a liar? Fail safe ways to determine if someone is telling the truth . New Zealand Herald . 2017-01-30.
  16. Web site: New Developed Software can detect lie with %75 success – Baltimore News . Albany Daily Star . 2016-08-17 .
  17. Web site: To spot a liar, look at their hands . 12 December 2015 . Quartz . 2015-12-12.
  18. Web site: Courtroom fibs used to develop lie-detecting software . Gizmag . 2015-12-12. 2015-12-12 .
  19. Web site: University professors create new software to detect lies . 10 December 2015 . Michigan Daily . 2015-12-11.
  20. Web site: Liar, Liar Pants On Fire: 6 Signs Computers Use To Spot Liars With 75% Accuracy . Medical Daily . 2015-12-16. 2015-12-15 .
  21. Web site: 5 Ways to Tell If Someone is Lying to You . 15 December 2015 . Yahoo! Health . 2015-12-15.
  22. Web site: New software analysis words, gestures to detect lies. . Jagran Post . 2015-12-11.
  23. Web site: Fake news detector algorithm works better than a human. 2018-08-21. University of Michigan News. en-US. 2019-03-26.
  24. Web site: Episode 31: From Romania – Immigrant Computer Scientists Podcast . 2023-03-19 . en-US.
  25. Web site: Mihai Burzo's research works University of Michigan .

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