Colby College hires director for artificial intelligence institute

Colby College has hired a language processing expert to lead its newly formed Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Amanda Stent, considered one of the country's leading authorities on natural language processing – which gives computers the ability to understand human text and spoken words – will start in October. Stent most recently served as the natural language processing architect at Bloomberg L.P., where she led the People and Language AI Team. Stent has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers on natural language processing and is a regular speaker on the subject. She was also involved in the CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project that led to a range of AI applications, including the well-known virtual assistant Siri.