ISI Directory

Jonathan May, Ph.D.

Research Associate Professor of Computer Science, Principal Scientist

Education

B.S.E., Computer Science Engineering, University of Pennsylvania
M.S.E., Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Southern California

Bio

Jonathan May is a Research Associate Professor at USC and Principal Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), where he directs the Center for Useful Techniques Enhancing Language Applications Based on Natural And Meaningful Evidence. Dr. May's current research efforts include building empathetic chatbots to curb online toxicity, teaching agents to collaborate and compete in strategic gameplay, and developing interactive knowledge management systems. He was previously involved in multiple leadership positions in ISI’s efforts centered around translation and multilinguality. He has written and spoken about large language models extensively in the public sphere. May is an expert in architecture development for natural language processing, human-machine natural language interaction, computational journalism, machine translation, multilinguality, and transfer learning, with an extensive publication record that includes two outstanding paper awards and one best demo award. He has organized multiple NLP workshops and conferences at various service levels and currently is Treasurer of NAACL, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. He is also an Amazon Scholar. He received a BSE and MSE from Penn in 2001 and a PhD from USC in 2010.