McCallum Named 2017 Association for Computing Machinery Fellow

Andrew McCallum, computer science professor and director of the Center for Data Science in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has been named a fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for "contributions to machine learning with structured data and innovations in scientific communication."

McCallum is one of just 54 new ACM Fellows, representing 1 percent of the association's membership, named in 2017 for contributions to such areas as database theory, design automation, information retrieval, multimedia computing and network security. He is the 12th CICS faculty member to be honored with the distinction. The association will formally recognize its 2017 fellows at its annual awards banquet in June 2018 in San Francisco.

ACM President Vicki L. Hanson says, "The fellows program allows us to shine a light on landmark contributions to computing, as well as the men and women whose hard work, dedication and inspiration are responsible for groundbreaking work that improves our lives in so many ways."

McCallum, who joined the UMass Amherst faculty in 2003, focuses his research on statistical machine learning applied to text, including information extraction, social network analysis, and deep neural networks for knowledge representation. His work has been published in over 250 papers and has received over 50,000 citations. He was named the founding director of the UMass Amherst Center for Data Science in 2015.

CICS Dean Laura Haas says, "We are tremendously proud that Andrew McCallum's significant research accomplishments have been recognized with ACM's highest membership distinction. Andrew's leadership and innovations in machine learning have elevated and energized the field, and inspired a new generation of data scientists."

Among other honors and awards, McCallum is an AAAI fellow and the recipient of the UMass Amherst Chancellor's Award for Research and Creative Activity, the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Distinguished Research Award, as well as research awards from Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo!. He obtained a B.A. in computer science from Dartmouth College in 1989, and an M.Sc. in 1992 and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1995.

For more information about the ACM Fellows Program and a complete list of newly elevated fellows, see: https://awards.acm.org/fellows