Rada Mihalcea (@radamihalcea) / X

Rada Mihalcea

1,086 posts

Rada Mihalcea

@radamihalcea

Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science @UMich | Director @Michigan_AI Lab | Former @ACLmeeting President | PECASE, AAAI, ACL, ACM Fellow

web.eecs.umich.edu/~mihalcea

Joined January 2014

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Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Feb 27, 2025
Tomorrow at #AAAI25 we’ll present our paper “Why AI is W.E.I.R.D.* and why it shouldn’t be”— a position paper on challenges & opportunities in developing AI that works equally well for everyone. 🌍🌎🌏 arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16315 This is the result of a truly global collaboration,
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Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Apr 18, 2019
I made a bet that a Naive Bayes classifier would work as well on humor recognition as a neural net with fine-tuned Bert embeddings. I won 🙃 My lab uses neural nets often, but it’s good to remember there are other methods out there that may work just as well for certain tasks.
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
May 11, 2019
How words change meaning over time: “Baseline” (in NLP) 1998: random choice 2005: majority class 2012: bag of words 2019: LSTM with attention & pre-trained embeddings
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Sep 8, 2019
I nearly failed my first #AI class during undergrad. In fact, I nearly failed it while I was doing well in all other classes. That did not stop me from getting a PhD & pursuing a career in AI. Don’t let grades distract you from your passions. Here is to an amazing school year!
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Jun 21, 2020
The world did not need one more Python tutorial, but here it is. My attempt for the past 10wk to entertain a group of 10-12yrs old while teaching them Python. MadLibs, secret codes, drawings, RockPaperScissors &other fun stuff with Python on Colab. Enjoy! web.eecs.umich.edu/~mihalcea/urls…
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
May 23, 2023
“What should I work on?” is a question we hear more & more often from NLP students, during a time when the media rhetoric is that “it’s been all solved” Turns out there are many NLP research areas rich for exploration—here is our answer from 20+ students arxiv.org/abs/2305.12544
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Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Jun 16, 2019
To those of you who applied for but did not get the academic positions that you wanted—this is not a failure, it’s only a step on your path to success. 17 yrs ago I applied to Michigan & got turned down. 9 yrs later, Michigan recruited me. Just remember the value is in _you_
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Feb 2, 2019
Words of wisdom heard at #AAAI2019 from Turing award winner Ed Feigenbaum, quoting his advisor AI pioneer and Turing & Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon: “If you see a research area where many people are working, go somewhere else.”
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Jan 6, 2022
I am a woman in STEM. Were there people thinking I was hired over a more qualified male candidate? Most likely. Were they wrong? Definitely so. Happy to serve along with 1000s of other women as a learning lesson for generations to come, defeating history & harmful stereotypes.
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Jul 2, 2021
How words change meaning over time: “Old research” (in AI): 2000: it happened 40 years ago 2007: it happened 20 years ago 2014: it happened 10 years ago 2021: it happened 5 years ago .... 2028: it happened yesterday
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Nov 25, 2024
Don’t choose PhD programs by rankings—they may not be a good fit for you (& everyone applies there!) Instead, focus on potential advisors. How to find them? 1. Pick your top 20-40 favorite papers 2. Find the authors in academic positions 3. Apply to their schools Good luck!🍀
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Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Mar 17, 2019
Last week, I asked a group of future PhD students what they like to do in their free time. Some wondered “Can you have free time while doing a PhD?” Not only “you can”, but “you should”. Pursuing your hobbies and finding time for yourself are key ingredients for a successful PhD.
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Jun 23, 2019
On this day 20yrs ago I made my first @ACL_NLP presentation. On transparencies, I proposed the use of the web as a corpus, using AltaVista & an index of 160mil pg. Transparencies & AltaVista are long gone. The web & ACL are so much larger. My passion for NLP is bigger than ever.
Rada Mihalcea
@radamihalcea
Oct 22, 2022
As you start planning your PhD applications: Instead of applying to top 10 schools and looking for who happens to be there, Look for the people you would like to work with—eg, those who write the papers on research you really like— find where they are, and apply there.