“I fell in love with computers in grade 11, when my parents gave me a computer. I participated into an extracurricular computing club, I wrote my first program in the BASIC programming language, and I was hooked.”
Diana's biography
Diana Inkpen is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa since 2003. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science. She has a M.Sc. and B.Eng. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Her research is in applications of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence to tasks such as natural language understanding, natural language generation, information retrieval, information extraction, automatic text classification, and intelligent agents for the Semantic Web. She organized eight international workshops and she was a program co-chair for the Artificial Intelligence AI 2012 conference. She was invited speaker to 3 international conferences. She is in the program committees of many conferences in her field, and an associate editor of the Computational Intelligence and the Natural Language Engineering journals. She also holds a honorific title of Visiting Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. She received funding for many research projects from NSERC, SSHRC, and OCE, including many industrial collaborations. She supervised 10 M.Sc. students, 6 Ph.D. students, and 3 postdoctoral fellows. Currently she is supervising 6 M.Sc. students, 5 Ph.D. students, and one postdoctoral fellow. She published more than 25 journal papers, more than 80 conference and workshop papers, and 8 book chapters.
Professor of Computer Science. I work at the University of Ottawa, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. My work consists in teaching, research, and administrative tasks. I teach undergraduate classes (such as introduction to computing) and graduate courses (such as advanced techniques for text mining). For research, I follow my interests in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. I am developing new algorithms for specific tasks such as information extraction form texts, automatic text classification, opinion and emotion analysis from texts, analysis of social media texts, automatic generation of texts, etc. I am working with many companies for technology transfer, so that my research can be incorporated in the next generation of software products. I am training several Master’s and PhD students. We are writing together many research papers and sometimes we travel to conferences to present our work. Conference travel is an exciting aspect of my work, since it allows to meet famous researchers, and to visit wonderful places around the world. I am also involved in outreach activities at all levels, in order to motivate high school students to study computer science, undergraduate students to continue to graduate studies, and the graduates to stay in the field and to contribute to its advancement. Teaching undergraduate and graduate students gives me the highest satisfaction, especially when I succeed in sharing with them my passion for computer science.
Two things: 1) The beauty of computer science as reflected into the logic of the algorithms (there is no subjectivity, an algorithm works or not, and it can be tested). 2) The amazing range of applicability of the algorithms to practical software tools that can make our lives easier.
I fell in love with computers in grade 11, when my parents gave me a computer. I participated into an extracurricular computing club, I wrote my first program in the BASIC programming language, and I was hooked. Seeing that my program worked and did something useful gave me the satisfaction of a task well done. After this experience, I started my university degree in Computer Science and I continued to be fascinated by algorithms and their implementation them into software. Then, I discovered the world of research, where you can expand the existing knowledge by designing new algorithms for new practical applications.
Do not be afraid to discover the world of computing, algorithms and programming languages. It is a challenge that women are good at (logic skills). Discover the wide range of domains of applicability, which can help our society in many ways, and choose the one that excites you. It is important to do something that you like, and to do it well.
I like to watch movies to relax. I also like to do many outdoor activities as often as possible, such as hiking, rock climbing, biking, skiing, snowboarding, etc. I need physical challenges in addition to the intellectual challenges of my work. I like to keep pushing my limits. The most exciting was rock climbing. I was afraid to try it; but once I gathered my courage to try it, I was amazed that I can actually climb vertical walls of rock and frozen waterfalls. Since then, nothing looks impossible to me.
