Mark Finlayson

I am the Eminent Scholar Chaired Associate Professor of Computer Science in FIU's Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences.

Research Interests

I study the science of narrative, including understanding the relationship between narrative, cognition, and culture, developing new methods and techniques for investigating questions related to language and narrative, and endowing machines with the ability to understand and use narratives for a variety of applications. Key problems I have addressed so far include: extracting high-level narrative structure from sets of stories; techniques for discourse processing; temporal information extraction; general natural language processing; the creation, annotation, and manipulation of language resources; and collecting richly annotated corpora of stories. My research intersects computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computational social science, and the digital humanities.

Brief Bio

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Patrick H. Winston. Following that, I was a Research Scientist in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for 2½ years. I received my S.M. in 2001 from MIT, and the B.S. in 1998 from the University of Michigan, both in Electrical Engineering. I received promotion and tenure in Summer of 2020. While at FIU my work has been funded by NSF, NIH, ONR, DARPA, DHS, and IBM.