Biography
Professional Bio
Lise Getoor is a distinguished professor in the Computer Science Department at UC Santa Cruz and holds a Baskin Endowed Chair. Her research areas include machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty; in addition she works in data management, visual analytics and social network analysis. She has over 250 publications and extensive experience with machine learning and probabilistic modeling methods for graph and network data. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for Advancement of Science, Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinary (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She has been an elected board member of the International Machine Learning Society, served on the board of the Computing Research Association (CRA), has served as Machine Learning Journal Action Editor, Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions of Knowledge Discovery from Data, JAIR Associate Editor, and on the AAAI Council. She was co-chair for ICML 2011, and has served on the PC of many conferences including the senior PC of AAAI, ICML, KDD, NeurIPS, UAI, WSDM and the PC of SIGMOD, VLDB, and WWW. She is a recipient of an NSF Career Award and thirteen best paper and best student paper awards. In 2014, she was recognized as one of the top ten emerging researchers leaders in data mining and data science based on citation and impact according to KDD Nuggets. She has served on the external advisory board the San Diego Super Computer Center, and the scientific advisory board for the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, and has served on the advisory board for companies including Sentient Technologies. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2001, her MS from UC Berkeley, and her BS from UC Santa Barbara, and was a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 2001-2013.
Personal Bio
I was born in Seattle, WA. At the time, my father, Ronald Getoor, was a professor in the mathematics department at the University of Washington, and my mother, Ann Getoor, worked on the design of commercial airplanes at Boeing. When I was four, my dad took a position in the math department at UCSD, and we moved to San Diego. I grew up in San Diego, and am spoilt forever by its temperate climate.
Not wanting to move too far from the nice beaches and good weather, I did my undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science, highest honors. Then, I moved further up the coast of California, and went to UC Berkeley. I did my MS in Computer Science with Stuart Russell; my master’s thesis was ‘The Instance Description Language: How it can be Derived and the use of its Derivation”, which discussed the tree-structured bias induced by a logical reasoning system, and under what circumstances this lead to a computationally tractable learning problem (from the perspective of computational learning theory).
After graduating from Berkeley, I moved south a bit, working for several years at a small expert systems company in Palo Alto, Aion Corporation, where I was Ms. Object Oriented Programming, adding OO features to the company’s expert system. Then I moved a bit further south, to work at NASA-Ames, in Mountain View, CA. I worked on the COLLAGE Planning system, with Amy Lansky.
In 1995, I decided to return to school to get my PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University. I received a National Physical Sciences Consortium fellowship, which in addition to supporting me for six years, supported a summer internship at Xerox PARC, where I worked with Markus Fromherz and his group. Daphne Koller was my PhD advisor; in addition to working with her, I worked closely with Nir Friedman, and many other members of the DAGS group, including Avi Pfeffer, Mehran Sahami, Ben Taskar, Carlos Guestrin, Uri Lerner, Ron Parr, Eran Segal, and Simon Tong.
In 2001, I joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. In November, 2013, I joined the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.