Aravind K. Joshi, Henry Salvatori Professor, Computer and Cognitive Science University of Pennsylvania

Abstract
Besides briefly covering some highlights of the past 50 years of ACL from my perspective, I will try to comment on (1) why some directions of research were pursued for a while and then dropped, sometimes for a good reason and sometimes apparently for no reason, (2) why the relationship to Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and AI goes up and down, and (3) are there any leftovers that have the possibility of being turned into delicious contributions!
Short Bio
After completing his undergraduate work in Electrical and Communication Engineering in India, Aravind Joshi came to the University of Pennsylvania and obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1960. At present, he is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Joshi has worked on several problems that overlap computer science and linguistics. More specifically, he has worked on topics in mathematical linguistics as they relate to formal and linguistic adequacy of different formalisms and their processing implications. He has also worked on several aspects of theories of representation and inference in natural language, especially as they relate to discourse.
Joshi was the President of ACL in 1975 and was appointed as a Founding Fellow of ACL in 2011.
He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of ACL in 2002, the David Rumelhart Prize of the Cognitive Science Society in 2003 and the Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, in 2005. Click here for more information.

Computational linguistics: Where do we go from here?

Mark Johnson, Professor, Language Sciences (CORE) in the Department of Computing at Macquarie University

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” Niels Bohr
Abstract
The very fact that we’re having a 50th annual meeting means that our field hasn’t been a complete failure, but will there still be computational linguistics meetings in 50 years time? How do we fit into the larger intellectual picture, and what would it take to make computational linguistics into a real engineering discipline, or, for that matter, a scientific one? Prognosticating fearlessly (or perhaps just foolishly) I’ll draw some lessons from the last 50 years about what the next few might hold.
Short Bio
Mark Johnson is a Professor of Language Science (CORE) in the Department of Computing at Macquarie University. He was awarded a BSc (Hons) in 1979 from the University of Sydney, an MA in 1984 from the University of California, San Diego and a PhD in 1987 from Stanford University. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT from 1987 until 1988, and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Stuttgart, the Xerox Research Centre in Grenoble, CSAIL at MIT and the Natural Language group at Microsoft Research. He has worked on a wide range of topics in computational linguistics, but his main research area is parsing and its applications to text and speech processing. He was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2003, and was a professor from 1989 until 2009 in the Departments of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences and Computer Science at Brown University. Click here for more information.