Raymond J. Mooney

Professor of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin
Director of the UT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

B.S. in Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, 1983
M.S. in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, 1985
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, 1988

Research Teaching Personal Contact Note to Grad-Student Applicants

Research Interests and Publications

As a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory I lead the Machine Learning Research Group which has explored a variety of areas, but my current focus is on natural language processing / computational linguistics.

Recent Publications:

Here are my publications for 2024. 2023. 2022. 2021. and 2020.

Research Areas (click on an area for related publications):

For a complete list of areas and publications, see the UT Machine Learning Research Group home page. Also see my profile on Google Scholar.

Current Research Group Meetings:

Additional Affiliations:

Vita:

See my complete vita (in PDF).

Research Talks:

See my invited talk at the EMNLP 2023 Big Picture Workshop (12/7/23), The Vision Thing: Finding and Pursuing Your Research Passion

See a video of my UT issue-oriented talk (1/20/23) The New Era of Big Science AI: How can academics adapt to the new reality

See a video of my NLPCC'22 keynote talk on Answering Why Questions about Narrative Text.

See a video of my SIGDIAL'21 keynote talk on Robot Dialog: Perceptually Grounded Communication with Lifelong Learning.

See a video of my talk on Deep Learning for Automating Software Documentation Maintenance.

See a video of my invited talk on "The Deep Learning Revolution: Progress, Promise and Profligate Promotion" at Computing in the 21st Century 2017.

See videos of my invited talks on grounded language learning at Cornell Tech (2017), NIPS 2015 Multimodal Machine Learning Workshop, and AAAI-2013.

Also see my research talks on Deep Natural Language Semantics and Generating Natural-Language Video Descriptions Using Text-Mined Knowledge, as well as Powerpoint presentations for some of my older talks.

Course Information

Spring 2024

Fall 2023

Spring 2018

Fall 2010

Spring 2009

Fall 2007

Personal History

I grew up in the 60's and 70's in the small town of O'Fallon Illinois where starting in 1967 I attended St. Clare grade school and, starting in 1975, O'Fallon Township Highschool. See a scanned version of a paper I wrote (on a typewriter!) for a high-school English class when I was only 17 years old entitled "High-level Artificial Intelligence: An Imminent Possibility with an Enormous Potential for Good". My enthusiasm for AI started early and has not waned; however, my expections about AI's rate of progress and its positive social implications have matured and (hopefully) become more realistic.

In the fall of 1979, I went to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana to obtain all of the degrees listed above. In December 1987, I completed my Ph.D. thesis under the direction of Prof. Gerald DeJong and then began as a faculty member here in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin.

See more information on my academic genealogy, which traces my professorial lineage back through Danish Linguists to German Theologians.

Recently, I have become particularly well known for a certain strongly stated comment, which can be embedded into the following vector: (0.62384789, 0.232328242, 0.2394182754, 0.9234583745, 0.9034527345, 0.2348534598743, 0.789045724387, 0.34750893274895, 0.23475809273485723, 0.23452374958, 0.094358923475823475, 0.908452352348905, 0.024375823785, 0.980459238409582345) (click to decode).

Contact Information

Office:
3.806 GDC, (512) 471-9558
Email address:
mooney@cs.utexas.edu
Postal address:
Department of Computer Science
The University of Texas at Austin
2317 Speedway, Stop D9500
Austin, Texas 78712-1757
U.S.A.
Home address:
4707 Eby Lane
Austin, Texas 78731-4507
U.S.A.

Note to Potential Grad-Student and Internship Applicants

Unfortunately, I am unable to personally respond to email requests regarding application to our graduate program or other solicitations for positions in my research lab. I encourage potential graduate-student applicants to see the department information on applying to our graduate program. I am no longer recruiting new Ph.D. students. I am afraid I currently have no funding or capacity to advise summer internships.


mooney@cs.utexas.edu