By Evan Phillips
Meet Barbara Di Eugenio, Professor of Computer Science. At the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dr. Di Eugenio leads the Natural Language Processing (NLP) lab engaged in the transformative research of applying computer understanding of human language to the betterment of our world. She has been a keen supporter and member of AWIS-CAC, serving as treasurer for the chapter from 2014-17. In 2013, her work on NLP computational models and real-world applications was recognized by AWIS-CAC with the 7th Innovator of the Year award. Her PhD mentees total 13 to date, half of which have been women—almost double the national computer science average. I had the pleasure of speaking with her and learning about her academic career and passion for mentorship.
Dr. Di Eugenio had a love for mathematics growing up and wanted to find an interesting way to apply it. It was during her undergraduate years at the University of Turin when she first had the opportunity to consider whether she would pursue research as a career. She credits her academic mentors with the strong encouragement to do exactly this. However, she says it was more “happenstance” that she chose the field of NLP. By the time she was ready to pick a topic for her undergraduate thesis, it came down to either operating systems or NLP. Her criteria for selecting the topic came down to how friendly and approachable the professors she contacted were. As it turned out, she was not able to schedule an appointment with the operating systems professor. To pursue her new field further, she made her to way to Rutgers University as a Fulbright Fellow and then University of Pennsylvania for a PhD in computer science. From there, she continued teaching and doing research in Pittsburgh for five years before starting at UIC as an Assistant Professor. “In thirty years, the field has changed so much. I started working on it; I started liking it; and I kept liking it. That’s why I’m still at it now!” she said with a chuckle. In 2002, a few years after starting at UIC, she received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award. This early career award advanced her research in educational applications of NLP while she dedicated herself to mentoring women scientists in computer science.
“I’m really passionate about mentoring students. This has always been my favorite part of the job and still really is. It’s really great to see someone who starts as a student and basically becomes a colleague with whom you can have intellectually stimulating discussions on topics of interest and advance the field and discuss issues. That really keeps me going. I’ve always been very keen on promoting women in science, particular in computer science.” UIC proved to be an exceptionally supportive institution for women in STEM. Dr. Di Eugenio credits another NSF grant (ADVANCE program) awarded in 2006 at UIC. This grant spurred recruitment of women faculty and postdocs and solidified a positive culture of leadership, which included a few senior women faculty members.
As with other rapidly evolving technology fields, NLP has big challenges to overcome. A major challenge, according to Di Eugenio, is the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, “I don’t buy or subscribe to the hype. I see how easily these technologies pervade society but … society is not ready or informed enough about the limitations, the dangers, and the inherent biases that can be there. At the same time, some of my areas of applications for NLP, health sciences and educational technologies, there is really an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of people.” I also asked her how she would like to contribute to the health and education sectors: “I hope I can make a difference if not directly through some result of my own then at least through pushing a viewpoint to the community.” One of her main viewpoints she is aiming to promote is to question the development of NLP into a form of black box machine learning. That is to say, she is committed to ensuring that the algorithms and training sets used for NLP are transparent and understandable so that we can feel secure about how a decision or output was generated.
I was also interested to learn what professional goals Dr. Di Eugenio has in sight beyond 2021. One is serving as a NSF program officer for a few years so that she can play a role on “the other side of the grant review process.” The second involves the interaction of NLP with social media platforms: “This past spring, I led a seminar on NLP for social media. It was enlightening, especially reading these papers that concern what social media can do wrong—hate, bullying, and so on. But also sometimes techniques to discover bias sort of reintroduce bias from a different perspective. For example, there is work on recognizing offensive language. There was a very interesting paper we looked at that tried to attribute tweets to African American or white writers. Then lo and behold, the African American tweets were considered more offensive because these techniques are not very sophisticated. If they see a certain word, they think it’s offensive but in that context in that community it might not be offensive. So, these issues are interesting and complicated. I haven’t really worked on social media research-wise and so that’s an area I would maybe like to make a contribution to going forward.”
At the end of our conversation, Dr. Di Eugenio offered some parting words of advice that should ring true for academics. “Learn to say no,” she said first. “I don’t know if it’s being a woman, or being an assistant professor, or being at the beginning of your career, but it is really hard to say no to things. But one has to be able to focus on the important things.” Second, she stressed the importance of finding a good mentor: “That is one of the things that came out from this [NSF] ADVANCE grant, a formal mentoring program at UIC in general, not just for STEM.” Finally, she gave a practical tip that I found very helpful: “I found that I have to put slots in my calendar for writing. Only then could I make progress [on a book]. Consider it a meeting time for yourself and your work. It should be some time on your schedule reserved for the important things you need to do to advance your career …. I talk about this like I have practiced it for 30 years, but I guess that is a thing one learns …. I would recommend it.”