Computer and Cognitive Science Professor Aravind Joshi became the third winner of a prestigious annual award for research in human cognition last month.
Joshi was named this year's David E. Rumelhart Prize recipient for his contributions in computational linguistics.
The Rumelhart Prize consists of $100,000 furnished by the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation and the Cognitive Science Society, and is named after Rumelhart, a cognitive scientist from Stanford University.
Joshi will receive his award at a ceremony in August 2003.
Among his contributions to the field of cognitive science, Joshi earned an 11-year grant from the National Science Foundation in 1991 for Penn's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, where he was co-director until a year and a half ago.
He also helped pioneer the cognitive science program at the University in 1985 and has developed a defining concept in his field known as the Tree Adjoining Grammar Formalism.
"I was pleased and surprised," said Joshi of his initial reaction to the award.
But Linguistics Department Chairman and colleague Anthony Kroch said he wasn't surprised at all.
"I thought that the award of the prize committee to Professor Joshi was entirely appropriate and in fact does as much honor to the prize committee as it does to the recipient," Kroch said.
Mark Liberman, a Linguistics professor and Joshi's successor as IRCS, served on the advisory board responsible for naming Joshi the recipient. He viewed the choice of Joshi as "the natural and obvious" one.
Joshi's contributions to computational linguistics were even responsible for Liberman coming to the University.
"The first time I visited Penn for a workshop, I was really impressed by the nature of the interdisciplinary relationships he had established on campus," Liberman said. "It was so different from what I had seen on other campuses at the time."
One of the primary reasons Liberman and the advisory board selected Joshi as the winner was the manner in which Joshi's Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism drew on the fields of linguistics, computer science, psychology and philosophy to contribute to cognitive science as a whole.
Joshi explained TAG as a way of organizing a collection of words, the linguistic structures associated with them and the rules used in combining both.
The ultimate goals of TAG and Joshi's other work are to construct the computational and grammatically correct equivalents of certain languages. Joshi has worked on translating both the Korean and Chinese languages here at Penn. He developed TAG in the 1970s, and it has been used in the decades since by linguists in both the United States and Europe.
Joshi's work can be used to build robotic machines capable of communicating in words, and the principles of his language parsing can be used to construct programs in RNA mapping and protein sequencing.
Engineering School Dean Eduardo Glandt attributes Penn's status as "one of the strongest places in computational linguistics" to Joshi.
He went on to describe the professor as "a major presence on a campus of distinguished people" and "beloved by his colleagues."
"All his career he has been the most generous man, the one that everyone trusts and looks up to as a role model, and that's why it's so nice his scientific achievement was recognized. I'm delighted," Glandt said.
The Engineering School will hold a ceremony in October to celebrate Joshi and the school's other faculty who have received awards this year.
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