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Brown CS is happy to announce that effective as of July 1, 2024, faculty member Ellie Pavlick has received a distinguished named chair. Formerly the Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science, she’s now the Briger Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Computer Science.

Ellie came to Brown CS in 2017 after receiving her doctorate from University of Pennsylvania. Director of the Language Understanding and Representation (LUNAR) Lab, her research seeks to understand how language “works” and to build computational models which can understand language the way that humans do. Her lab's projects focus on language broadly construed, and often include the study of capacities more general than language, including conceptual representations, reasoning, learning, and generalization. Recent papers include “How Can Deep Neural Networks Inform Theory in Psychological Science?”, “Circuit Component Reuse Across Tasks in Transformer Language Models”, and “Uncovering Intermediate Variables in Transformers Using Circuit Probing”. Currently, Ellie’s teaching includes CSCI 1460 Computational Linguistics and CSCI 1952-I Language Processing in Humans and Machines.

Ellie was named the Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 2020 and received the department’s largest grant to date in the same year. Last year, she was interviewed on 60 Minutes, America’s oldest and most-watched television newsmagazine, and served on a panel at the inaugural lecture in a new series about the opportunities and impact of AI technology. Her recent honors include a *SEM Best Paper Award (“So-Called Non-Subsective Adjectives”) and a Facebook PhD Fellowship (“Meaning Variation in Paraphrase”). Recently, she was a keynote speaker at the Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) Conference, the Royal Society Workshop on Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, and was a panelist at the Debate on Sensory Grounding in AI hosted by the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness.

“Whenever I'm collaborating with other research colleagues,” says Albert Webson, one of Ellie’s former doctoral advisees, “I always feel like I have a limited amount of political capital that I have to judiciously distribute only to arguing about points that I really care about. With Ellie, we discussed and argued about every paragraph and every figure in our papers – that was the epitome of scientific research rigor which I will never surpass again. Who in AI research runs every experiment with eight random seeds, and every result comes with four statistical tests that are all open-sourced and reproducible?”

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