Kathy McKeown

A leading scholar and researcher in the field of natural language processing, McKeown focuses her research on big data; her interests include text summarization, question answering, natural language generation, multimedia explanation, digital libraries, and multilingual applications. Her research group's Columbia Newsblaster, which has been live since 2001, is an online system that automatically tracks the day's news, and demonstrates the group's new technologies for multi-document summarization, clustering, and text categorization, among others. Currently, she leads a large research project involving prediction of technology emergence from a large collection of journal articles.
McKeown joined Columbia in 1982, immediately after earning her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania. In 1989, she became the first woman professor in the school to receive tenure, and later the first woman to serve as a department chair (1998-2003).
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