Maria Leonor Pacheco

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I lead the Boulder Language and Social Technologies research group. I am fortunate to be part of the thriving Boulder NLP community, working alongside outstanding colleagues and students. I am also a Faculty Fellow at CU’s Institute of Cognitive Science, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Information Science.

Before joining CU, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research NYC. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Purdue University, and my BSc. in Computer Science and Engineering at the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela, where I was born and raised.

I am not recruiting new PhD students.

My Work

I work at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, and Computational Social Science. My research develops methods to integrate structured knowledge with machine learning for NLP, with a particular emphasis on discourse modeling. I am also broadly interested in human-centered aspects of language technology and in the use of NLP to study socio-technical systems. Collaboration across disciplines is central to my work. I work closely with researchers in linguistics, human-computer interaction, formal methods, security, biomedical informatics, and the behavioral and social sciences. For more details, please see my full list of publications.

Interested in working with me?

• If you are a student at CU come talk to me about your research interests and ideas!
• If you are prospective PhD student please apply to CU and mention my name in your application. I will carefully consider all applications of prospective students interested in working with me. However, I might not be able to reply to all prospective students email. For more thoughts on this, I recommend Prof. Yonatan Bisk’s notes on cold emailing professors.
• I do not have positions available for students outside of CU.