Dr. Surdeanu earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, in 2001. He has more than 15 years of experience in building systems driven by natural language processing NLP) and machine learning. His experiences both academia Stanford University, University of Arizona) and industry Yahoo! Research and two NLP-centric startups) During his career he published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, including two articles that were among the tothree most cited articles at two different NLP conferences. He was a leader or member of teams that ranked in the tothree at seven highly competitive international evaluations of end-user NLP systems such as question answering and information extraction. His work was funded by several government organizations DARPA, NIH) as well as private foundations the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation)