Rate My Professor Rohini Srihari

Rohini Srihari is a professor and associate chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo, where she specializes in natural language processing and artificial intelligence within the broader field of Computer Science. She holds a B.Math degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a PhD in Computer Science from University at Buffalo in 1992. Srihari has a distinguished career blending academia and industry. She founded and served as CEO and chief scientist for Janya Inc. and Cymfony Inc., startups specializing in text analysis and big data analytics solutions, both later acquired by major media analytics companies. Additionally, she was Chief Data Scientist at PeaceTech Lab, part of the United States Institute of Peace, where she led the creation of an AI platform for conflict prediction and early warning in fragile states using multifaceted data sources.

Her research interests encompass information extraction, retrieval, multimedia information retrieval, text mining, machine learning, and conversational AI. Funded by NSF, DARPA, and IARPA, her projects include developing multilingual text mining tools for the US government and advancing socialbots for empathetic conversations, as in the NSF grant "Purposeful Conversational Agents based on Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs." Srihari directs the Conversational AI for Social Good group at University at Buffalo, focusing on trustworthy AI to combat disinformation and aid the disabled. In 2021, under her supervision, Team Proto—an interdisciplinary student team—secured the bronze prize in the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. With over 100 publications in top journals and conferences, a Google Scholar h-index of 40, and two US patents including one on context-aware back-transliteration (2014) and another on face identification (2003), Srihari has significantly influenced AI and NLP fields. Notable works include "OpinionMiner" at KDD 2009, "BREAKING! Presenting Fake News Corpus for Automated Fact Checking" at ACL 2019 Student Research Workshop, and "Disinformation-Analysis and Identification" in 2021.