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Now in its eighth year, Brown University’s annual Early Career Research Achievement Award is presented by the Office of the Vice President for Research and supported by the Office of the President and the Provost to nurture and recognize the extraordinary research contributions of faculty. It’s given in three areas (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; Physical Sciences; and Life Sciences and Public Health) to a member of the faculty at the Assistant Professor rank or who was promoted to Associate Professor in the previous academic year, in recognition of an exemplary portfolio of research achievement during their first years at Brown. This year, Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ellie Pavlick is the winner in the Physical Sciences category.

Also a Research Scientist at Google Deepmind, Ellie leads the Language Understanding and Representation (LUNAR) Lab, which seeks to understand how language “works” and build computational models that can understand language the way that humans do. Their projects focus on language broadly construed and often include the study of capacities more general than language, including conceptual representations, reasoning, learning, and generalization. 

Recently, Ellie was interviewed on television newsmagazine 60 Minutes, took part in a new AI discussion series hosted by Brown’s Office of the Provost, and was awarded a grant for her work with language acquisition and information retrieval that set a Brown CS record. She was a keynote speaker at the 2019 International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) and gave invited talks at the 2019 New England Machine Learning and Harvard Linguistics Universals Colloquium Series. She was also Team Co-Lead for the Workshop on General Purpose Sentence Representation Learning at the 2018 Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop on Language Technology (JSALT) and Area Chair of Sentence-Level Semantics for the Association for Computational Linguistics in the same year.

Ellie joins multiple prior Brown CS winners of the Early Career Research Achievement Award, including (most recently) Stefanie Tellex. A full list of this year's winners is available here.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.