During the UMass Amherst Faculty Convocation held in September, Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy presented Professor Andrew McCallum with the 2012 Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity. McCallum was one of five nationally and internationally acclaimed faculty members presented with the award.
McCallum's research focuses on information extraction and data mining. He has been active in research on statistical machine learning applied to text, especially information extraction, entity disambiguation, information integration, document classification, clustering, finite state models, semi-supervised learning, and social network analysis. McCallum is the director of the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory and he also heads the campus's Computational Social Science Initiative, a cross-disciplinary, collaborative group that addresses the challenges and opportunities presented by collecting, storing, and analyzing large-scale data related to the social world. It offers the expertise needed to create practical solutions to challenges in everything from fighting crime and terrorism to tracking disease outbreaks and confronting climate change.
In 2009, McCallum was named an AAAI Fellow. He is the recipient of the UMass Amherst NSM (now CNS) Faculty Outstanding Research Award, the UMass Amherst Lilly Teaching Fellowship, and research awards from IBM and Google. He was the General Chair of the 2012 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).