Brief bio
Stuart Shieber is James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. His primary research field is computational linguistics, the study of human languages from the perspective of computer science. His research contributions have extended beyond that field as well, to theoretical linguistics, natural-language processing, computer-human interaction, automated graphic design, the philosophy of artificial intelligence, computer privacy and security, and computational biology. He is the founding director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society and a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Professor Shieber received an AB in applied mathematics summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1981 and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1989. He was awarded a Presidential Young Investigator award in 1991, and was named a Presidential Faculty Fellow in 1993, one of only thirty in the country in all areas of science and engineering. He has been awarded two honorary chairs: the John L. Loeb Associate Professorship in Natural Sciences in 1993 and the Harvard College Professorship in 2001. He was named a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014, and a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2017.
He is the author or editor of five books and numerous articles in computer science. He has been a member of the executive committee of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the editorial boards for the journals Computational Linguistics, Grammars, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Language and Computation, and Journal of Heuristics, and founded and organized the Computation and Language E-Print Archive until its superseding by the Computing Research Repository on which he advised.
Professor Shieber holds nine patents, and is co-founder of Cartesian Products, Inc., a high-technology research and development company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, providing advanced software technology to improve worldwide communication and information access. He is also the founder of Microtome Publishing, a company dedicated to nonstandard approaches to scholarly publishing.
His work on open access and scholarly communication policy, especially his development of Harvard's open-access policies, led to his appointment as the first director of the university's Office for Scholarly Communication, where he oversaw initiatives to open, share, and preserve scholarship.