Kathleen McKeown

McKeown’s work on disaster updates makes use of live, streaming information over each hour in the course of a disaster. This project incorporates personal experiences of those who have lived through a disaster, thus providing both an objective and personal point of view.

In the realm of social media, she has previously developed systems to identify influence in social media and to identify an author's personal traits. She is now working on identifying sentiment in social media posts made in low resource languages (e.g., Uyghur) and on identifying aggression and loss in posts from gang-involved youths from Chicago.

McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and is also the Founding Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia. She served as the Director from July 2012 – June 2017. She served as Department Chair from 1998 – 2003 and as Vice Dean for Research for the School of Engineering and Applied Science for two years. McKeown received a PhD in Computer Science and Information Science in 1982 and an MS, also in Computer and Information Science, in 1979, both from the University of Pennsylvania.  She earned an AB in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1976.