Dr. Aron Culotta is the Nicholas J. Altiero Professor of Computer Science at Tulane University and Director of the Jurist Center for Artificial Intelligence and the Tulane Center for Community-Engaged Artificial Intelligence. He conducts interdisciplinary research in human-centered artificial intelligence, particularly in areas of natural language processing, social network analysis, and machine learning, with applications in public health, emergency response, criminal justice, and civic transparency. Examples include improving patient education, improving transparency in criminal justice, tracking diseases, measuring effectiveness of public health campaigns, informing crisis response, preventing online harassment, detecting deceptive marketing, and identifying unsafe products. The methods rely on machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis. Areas of technical contribution include domain adaptation, learning from label proportions, and causal inference.
He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008 with a focus on machine learning and natural language processing. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed publications at top venues (AAAI, ACL, ICML, etc.), including three best paper awards, was a Microsoft Live Labs Fellow, served as Program co-Chair of ICWSM, and has received over $8M in research funding, including from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.