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Rada Mihalcea
Rada Mihalcea, associate professor of computer science and engineering,
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UNT computer science professor to receive White House honor
DENTON (UNT), Texas -- An engineering researcher at the University of North Texas will be honored by the White House this week for her groundbreaking research on understanding the meaning of text and her exemplary commitments to education and community service. Rada Mihalcea, associate professor of computer science and engineering, is among the 100 university researchers nationwide to earn the recognition from the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor a beginning scientist or engineer can receive in the United States. Mihalcea will attend a ceremony at the White House on Jan. 13 (Wednesday), where she will meet President Barack Obama. "I'm excited and honored about this award," said Mihalcea, who is from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. "Thinking back to where I started, it makes me feel that everything is possible." Mihalcea's research focuses on the semantic interpretation of text for language-processing applications. Rather than using just one resource to model the meaning of words, Mihalcea finds ways to combine several different monolingual and multilingual lexical resources, covering a large number of languages. Mihalcea plans to explore a number of applications, including automatic word and text translation, and text-to-text similarity. She also plans to integrate these models into educational applications, which can be used to build a tool to assist Spanish-speaking students comprehend English texts by providing simpler English synonyms or translations into English. Mihalcea is the only professor at any Dallas/Fort Worth university to earn this recognition. The Presidential Award program recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of science and technology. Mihalcea was recommended for the award by the National Science Foundation, which honored her with a CAREER award in 2008. The CAREER award program, the most prestigious offered by the NSF for young investigators, supports early career development activities of teacher-scholars who effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.
UNT News Service Phone Number: (940) 565-2108
Contact: Sarah Bahari (940) 565-4835
Email: sarah.bahari@unt.edu
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