Prof. Eduard Hovy is the Executive Director of Melbourne Connect. Born in South Africa, Prof. Hovy completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987 and was awarded honorary doctorates from the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid in 2013 and the University of Antwerp in 2015.
Prior to commencing at Melbourne Connect in 2022, Prof. Hovy most recently served as Program Manager at the United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), and has previously worked as a research professor at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Prof. Hovy holds adjunct professorships in CMU’s Machine Learning Department and at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles). He is one of the initial 17 Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and is also a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Prof. Hovy’s research focuses on computational semantics of language and addresses various areas in Natural Language Processing and Data Analytics, including in-depth machine reading of text, information extraction, automated text summarisation, question answering, the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and ontologies, and machine translation.
Prof. Hovy is the author or co-editor of eight books and over 450 technical articles and is a popular invited speaker. Prof. Hovy regularly co-teaches Ph.D.-level courses and has served on Advisory and Review Boards for both research institutes and funding organisations in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, and the USA. Prof. Hovy loves travelling, classical and jazz music, and the great outdoors.
