Bio & CV

Bio

Jonathan K. Kummerfeld is a Senior Lecturer (ie., research tenure-track Assistant Professor) in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. He is currently also a DECRA fellow, and collaborates with a range of academics across the world, including on DARPA-funded projects on AI agents that communicate. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously a postdoc at the University of Michigan, and a visiting scholar at Harvard. Jonathan’s research focuses on interactions between people and NLP systems, developing more effective algorithms, workflows, and systems for collaboration. He has been on the program committee for over 50 conferences and workshops. He currently serves as Co-CTO of ACL Rolling Review (a peer review system), and is a standing reviewer for the Computational Linguistics journal and the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics journal. For more details, see his website: https://www.jkk.name

CV

PDF of my CV

Academic Path

  • University of Sydney
    Senior Lecturer, 2022– [current]
    and DECRA Fellow, 2023 - 2025 [current]
    Honorary Senior Lecturer 2021 - 2022
  • Harvard University
    Visiting Scholar, 2021 - 2022
  • University of Michigan
    Research Associate 2, 2021 - 2022
    Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2016 - 2021
  • University of California, Berkeley
    PhD, 2010 - 2016, Advisor: Dan Klein
  • University of Sydney
    B.Sc. (Adv) (Hons), 2006 - 2009, Advisor: James R. Curran

Industry Roles

Consultant / Technical Adviser

  • Everlaw, October 2021 - December 2022
  • Clinc, January 2017 - February 2020
  • Naming Matters, May 2015 - December 2019
  • WriteLab / WriteTrack (acquired by Chegg), March 2014 - May 2018
  • Techbridge, September 2013 - May 2014

Intern:

  • Google Research, Summer 2012
  • Google, Summer 2007 / 2008

Affiliations

Awards / Grants

  • DARPA: Friction for Accountability in Conversational Transactions (FACT AIE), 2024-2025
    Co-PI on grant to explore how friction can be used to improve human-AI systems
  • DARPA: Stabilizing Hostilities through Arbitration and Diplomatic Engagement Program (SHADE AIE), 2022-2023
    Co-PI on grant to develop collaborative AI models for the board game diplomacy with Maryland, Princeton, and ISI
  • ARC: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), 2021
    PI on grant to develop new methods for interactive executable semantic parsing
  • EMNLP: Conference Outstanding Reviewer, 2020
  • Bloomberg: Data Science Research Grant, 2019
    Co-PI on grant to develop adaptive annotation methods
  • Michigan: Institute for Data Science Music Initiative, 2018
    Co-PI on grant to develop models that map text to music
  • ACL: Conference Top Reviewer, 2018
  • Michigan: Outstanding Postdoctoral Fellow Award, 2018
    For excellence in research, mentorship, teaching, leadership, and service
  • AI2: Key Scientific Challenges Program, 2017
    Unrestricted funding to support research
  • Berkeley: Chair’s Special Award, 2013
    For services to the EECS department during student admissions and recruitment
  • Berkeley: Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, 2011
    University wide award in recognition of exceptional achievements as a teacher
  • General Sir John Monash Award, 2009
    Postgraduate scholarships for Australians who demonstrate outstanding leadership potential Australia’s most prestigious postgraduate scholarships
  • Sydney: University Medal in Computer Science, 2009
    For outstanding results, awarded at the discretion of the university senate

Publications

See my publications page

Teaching and Talks

See my teaching page

Service

Community Roles

  • ACL Rolling Review Co-CTO, April 2022 - December 2024
  • ACL Award Policy Committee Leader, 2021-2022
    Developed a policy for awards at ACL conferences

Conference Roles

  • EACL Best Paper Awards Committee Chair, 2023
  • VLDB Volunteer Chair, 2022

Grant Reviewing

  • ARC Future Fellow Detailed Assessor, 2023
  • ARC DP Detailed Assessor (x2), 2022
  • ARC DECRA Detailed Assessor (x2), 2022

Area Chair

  • ACL: Association for Computational Linguistics
    Computational Social Science and Social Media, 2020
    Resources and Evaluation, 2021
    Resources and Evaluation, 2023
  • ACL Rolling Review Action Editor, 2021–2022
  • DSTC: Dialog System Technology Challenges, Task Organiser, 2018, 2019

University Internal

  • Engineering Faculty Board, Sydney, 2024–2025
  • CS Education Committee, Sydney, 2024–2025
  • Hiring committee for education positions in Computer Science, Sydney, 2022
  • Hiring committee for the Computer Science Associate Head of Research, Sydney, 2022
  • Honours thesis examiner, Sydney, 2022
  • Dalyell mentor, Sydney, 2022, 2023
  • DEI Committee: Inclusive Environment, Michigan, 2020-2021
  • Hiring Comittee for Research Investigator, Michigan Medical School, 2017
  • Graduate Admissions Committee, Michigan Artificial Intelligence, 2017
  • Graduate Admissions Committee, Berkeley Artificial Intelligence, 2015
  • President, Berkeley Computer Science Graduate Student Association, 2012–2013

PhD Thesis Committee

  • David Fraile Navarro, Macquarie, 2023
  • Jordan S. Huffaker, Michigan, 2023
  • Laura (Wendlandt) Burdick, Michigan, 2020
  • Sai R. Gouravajhala, Michigan, 2020
  • Janarthanan Rajendran, Michigan, 2020

Masters Thesis Committee

  • Gregory Baker, Macquarie, 2023

Journal Reviewer

  • CL: Computational Linguistics, 2020, 2021
  • TACL: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2016, 2020-2024
  • JAIR: Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2017
  • CSL: Computer Speech & Language, 2017, 2019
  • Behaviour & Information Technology, 2021
  • TIIS: Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 2024

Program Committee - Conferences

  • ACL: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2014 (2nd), 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
  • NAACL: North American Chapter of the ACL, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021
  • EMNLP: Empirical Methods in NLP, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
  • EACL: European Chapter of the ACL, 2017, 2021
  • AACL: Asia-Pacific Chapter of the ACL, 2020, 2022
  • CoNLL: Conference on Natural Language Learning, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
  • IJCNLP: International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2017
  • AAAI: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2016, 2019
  • IJCAI: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019
  • CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019, 2022
  • CSCW: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 2020, 2021
  • UIST: ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, 2019
  • WWW / WebConf: World Wide Web Conference, 2016, 2019
  • ACII: Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction, 2021
  • AJCAI: Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2023
  • alt.chi, 2024

Program Committee - Workshops

  • ALTA: Australasian Language Technology Association, 2023
  • SRW: Student Research, ACL / NAACL, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 (x2), 2022
  • W-NUT: Noisy User-generated Text, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
  • IWPT: International Conference on Parsing Technologies, 2020, 2021
  • NLP-CSS: NLP and Computational Social Science, 2019, 2020
  • EthNLP: Ethics in NLP, 2017
  • Gen-Deep: New Forms of Generalization in Deep Learning and NLP, 2018
  • RepEval: Evaluating Vector Space Representations for NLP, 2019
  • DeepLo: Deep Learning for Low Resource NLP, 2019, 2022
  • IntEx-SemPar: Interactive and Executable Semantic Parsing, 2020
  • DaSH-LA: Data Science with Human-in-the-Loop: Language Advances, 2021
  • WiNLPL Widening NLP, 2021, 2022
  • Human-Centered Large Language Modeling Workshop, 2024

Other Reviewer

  • Tapia Conference Poster Reviewer, 2020
  • Tapia Doctoral Consortium Judge, 2020

Session Chair

  • ALTA: Australasian Language Technology Association, 2022, 2023

Mentor

  • SRW: Student Research Workshop, ACL / NAACL, 2019, 2020
  • ACL Year-Round Mentorship Program, 2021-2022

Press

Interviews and mentions of my work in media:

Misc

My academic family tree is:
Dan Klein - Chris Manning - Joan Bresnan - Noam Chomsky - Zellig Harris - James Alan Montgomery - Hermann Vollrat Hilprecht - Friedrich Delitzsch and Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer - Unkown and Franz Julius Delitzsch - Unknown

My Erdős number is at most 5:
J. K. Kummerfeld - D. Klein - J. Andreas - R. Kleinberg - L. Lovász - P. Erdős.