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.

Colby College is carving out space in the liberal arts canon for artificial intelligence. Thanks to a $30 million gift from an alumnus, the small, selective college in Maine is establishing the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which aims to integrate machine learning, natural language processing and big data into instruction and research across the college. "We want to be sure we're preparing students well for their futures: lives and careers of meaning and purpose," says Margaret McFadden, provost and dean of faculty at Colby. "Well-educated people have to understand AI, what these tools are and how to use them." Artificial intelligence has homes at other U.S. higher ed institutions, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Georgia, Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and Stanford University.