Atefeh Farzindar

Dr. Atefeh (Anna) Farzindar is a research associate of the Data Science Institute (DSI) and a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science, Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). She received her Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Montreal and her Doctorate in automatic summarization of legal documents from Paris-Sorbonne University in 2005.

Dr. Farzindar was founder and CEO of NLP Technologies Inc. specializing in natural language processing, summarization of legal decisions, machine translation, and social media analysis. She has served as Industry Chair of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (2013-2015); General Co-chair of the 2013 AI/GI/CRV Conference, Regina, Canada; General Chair of the 2014 AI/GI/CRV Conference, Montréal, Canada; Program Committee co-chair for the 23rd Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI 2010), Ottawa, Canada; Chair of the technology sector of the Language Industry Association Canada (AILIA 2009-2013); Vice President of The Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) of Canada (2012-2014); member of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Computer Science Liaison Committee (since 2014); and member of the Canadian Advisory Committee of International Organization for Standardization (ISO). She was an Adjunct Professor at the University of Montréal, Canada (2009-2015), Lecturer at Polytechnique Montréal, engineering school (2012-2014), and Visiting Professor and Honorary Research Fellow at the Research Group in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK (2010-2012).

Dr. Farzindar won Femmessor-Montréal's contest, Succeeding with a balanced lifestyle, in the Innovative Technology and Information and Communications Technology category because of her involvement in the arts. Her paintings were published in the book One Thousand and One Nights in 2014. She has published more than 50 conference and journal papers, authored 3 books, and contributed the chapter Social Network Integration in Document Summarization to the book Innovative Document Summarization Techniques: Revolutionizing Knowledge Understanding, published by IGI Global.