Caragea receives first Robert V. Kenyon Professorship

Professor Cornelia Caragea is the first recipient of the newly established Robert V. Kenyon Professorship, the first endowed named professorship that is exclusively bestowed to a professor in the computer science department.

The professorship is supported by computer science Professor Emeritus Robert V. Kenyon and his spouse, Cynthia A. Vahlkamp. Kenyon has a track record of groundbreaking professional contributions at UIC, where he has been a tenured professor since 1986. Vahlkamp has a record of business success and non-profit service in education and the arts.

“I thank Professor Emeritus Robert V. Kenyon and his spouse, Cynthia Vahlkamp, for all the great opportunities they created!” Caragea said. “I am also grateful to College of Engineering Dean Peter Nelson, who was fostering the development of this professorship.”

Caragea’s commitment to research, education, student mentorship, and a demonstrated ability to elevate the department’s stature further internally and externally reflects the couple’s values and philanthropic commitment to investing in human potential.

Caragea was thrilled to be selected for the professorship, especially when she learned who funded the position.

“When I learned that my professorship came from one of my renowned colleagues who I respected and appreciated tremendously, that made me a thousand times happier,” Caragea said. “I was also fortunate to meet his spouse, Cynthia, who impressed me with her kindness, the strong leadership roles she held throughout her career, and her commitment to UIC’s success.”

Caragea’s research interests include natural language processing, deep learning, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence. Specifically, she is interested in large language models and their generation and prediction quality and trustworthiness, natural language understanding and natural language inference, data quality, and machine-in-the-loop learning.

To date, her research has resulted in more than 170 peer-reviewed publications in top venues, and she has received more than 6,600 citations. Her publications also received several best student paper awards, best AI deployed application awards, and a best insight paper award, and enabled fruitful collaborations in the U.S. and abroad.

In 2017, Caragea received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. She also received a COE faculty research award for Excellence in Research from COE/UIC for the 2020-2021 school year and appeared on an Elsevier list of the “top 2% of scientists in their fields” for single-year impact in 2020. In 2023, Caragea received a Fulbright Scholarship for teaching and research.

“The Robert V. Kenyon Professorship will help me to further enhance my professional development in the areas of my research and to continue to stay up-to-date with state-of-the-art approaches, to attend and publish papers in top conferences in my areas of research, to visit collaborators in the United States and abroad, and to obtain preliminary research results to be used as the basis for grant proposals that I plan to submit in the near future,” Caragea said.

In addition to research, Caragea is deeply committed to excellence in teaching, education, and mentoring. At UIC, she’s taught courses on deep learning for natural language processing and information retrieval.

Caragea is currently serving as a program director at the NSF in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). The directorate has an annual budget of over $1 billion and advances research, innovation, and education in computer science, information science, and computer engineering fields. CISE supports hundreds of academic and research organizations across the U.S.

“I look forward to teaching these courses again once I return to UIC from my NSF term,” Caragea said. “At UIC, I currently advise 15 brilliant PhD students and have graduated seven PhD students with whom I have published many research papers in top venues. These students went to both academia and industry.”

Caragea has also worked with many UIC undergraduate students, some of whom participated as research interns in her research group during the last few summers.

“I am very excited about the diversity of students in my research group and at UIC, and I will continue to strive to increase this diversity,” Caragea said. “The Robert V. Kenyon Professorship will help me to continue to recruit new students to pursue graduate studies at UIC and to establish new programs and collaborations worldwide.”