Shlomo Argamon

"I grew up as a science and math nerd."

"I discovered a love of computing in high school, when personal computing was still fairly new the early 80s."

"The idea that computers could be programmed to lead to intelligence, as in the robots in the science fiction I enjoyed."

"I fell in love with the field of artificial intelligence as an undergraduate in applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon."

"I aimed at a research career and did my doctorate researching machine learning for mobile robots under the late brilliant Drew McDermott at Yale."

"I switched research directions towards natural language processing, using computers to understand human language."

"I discovered a love of integrating the precise and mathematical in computing with the personal and meaningful in language."

"The breadth of the field, combining math, computing, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and more, is what has kept me in it for decades."

"I saw the growing interest in data science as a distinct field, and proposed to the Illinois Tech university leadership."

"I recruited collaborators, led the development of a curriculum, and shepherded the proposal through a gauntlet of curriculum committees."

"I discovered a love for designing and implementing processes the help people learn and perform, and for building effective teams to address complex problems."

"Early in my work on using computers to analyze authorship figuring out who wrote a document based on the wording and grammar."

"My colleagues and I looked at the classic case of Shakespeare we looked at a play for which scholars disputed whether Shakespeare or his contemporary Christopher Marlowe wrote or if they each wrote different parts of it."

"To our great surprise and excitement, our results showed unequivocally that Marlowe had written the entire play."

"We want to produce well rounded data scientists."

"We are talking to people in industry who want to do adjunct teaching for some courses that are down to earth."

"Students coming in for a data scientist course are not looking for a real narrow technical focus but a broader in interdisciplinary approach."

"They may still not understand it involves learning to talk with people who are not technical."

"I hope they will learn how important these skills can be."