Dr. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information and the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. Her primary research interests are user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and improving MOOCs. She wrote the first book on Search User Interfaces.

Prof. Hearst was named a Fellow of the ACM in 2013, a member of the CHI Academy in 2017, and has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, two Google Research Awards, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, four Excellence in Teaching Awards.

Prof. Hearst is currently President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She has served on the Advisory Council of NSF’s CISE Directorate and is currently on the Web Board for CACM, member of the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, and on the Edge.org panel of experts. She is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) and was formerly on the boards of ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Computational Linguistics, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), and IEEE Intelligent Systems.

Prof. Hearst received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and she was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.

How often do we have the designs we want, vs the designs that our algorithms know how to make? For many years, I have thought about how to build user interfaces that make use of the output of natural language processing. Language usually does not reveal itself readily to automation; it requires a great deal of care to produce results that are worthy of being viewed by people. In the spirit of today’s re-assessment of the role algorithms and AI in society, this talk will review past and current approaches to using natural language processing algorithms in real designs that impact people in real ways, with a focus on search user interfaces and information visualizations like word clouds.