Amanda Stent has been named the inaugural director of the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Colby announced earlier in the year that it had received a $30-million gift from the Davis family to establish the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The institute will provide new pathways for talented students and faculty to research, create, and apply AI and machine learning (ML) in a manner that is informed and driven by a broad liberal arts perspective.
Dr. Stent, who most recently served as the natural language processing (NLP) architect at Bloomberg L.P. NLP is the branch of artificial intelligence that provides computers with the ability to understand human text and spoken words. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers on natural language processing, regularly speaks or presents on the topic, and is co-inventor on more than 30 NLP-related patents. Her strong background in academia includes acting as co-principal investigator on a large National Science Foundation information technology research grant that graduated interdisciplinary students across psychology, linguistics, and computer science. Additionally, Dr. Stent was involved in the famous CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project that directly led to a wide range of AI and NLP applications, most notably Apple’s virtual assistant Siri.
Before joining the private sector, Stent was a tenured associate professor of computer science at Stony Brook University in New York, where she created an interdisciplinary computational linguistics graduate program and designed and taught new graduate courses in speech processing, natural language processing, and information retrieval.
“The mission of Colby’s Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence is to use AI creatively, while also preparing future leaders to predict and understand its impact, so negative impacts are mitigated and positive impacts are reinforced, and that’s exactly aligned with where I want to be in my career right now,” commented Dr. Stent. “Being at Colby will give me the opportunity to work with students and faculty across disciplines to not only use AI to inform those disciplines but ensure that all of those disciplines inform AI.”
Dr. Stent earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Houghton College in New York. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester.