Amber Stubbs
Associate Professor and Chair of Computer, Data & Mathematical Sciences, and Undergraduate Computer Science & Informatics Program Director
Amber Stubbs graduated from Simmons University in 2005 with an B.S. in Computer Science and English, then attended Brandeis University where she earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science, specifically in the field of natural language processing. While at Brandeis she co-authored a book, Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning (O'Reilly, 2012) with James Pustejovksy.
Her doctoral dissertation, "A Methodology for Using Professional Knowledge in Corpus Annotation," involved creating an annotation methodology to extract high-level information — such a hospital patient's medical diagnosis — from narrative texts. As part of that research, she also developed the Multi-Purpose Annotation Environment (MAE) and Multi-document Adjudication Interface (MAI) software, which is used at institutions around the world for natural language processing research.
After completing her Ph.D., Amber worked as a Postdoctoral Associate underOzlemUzuner at the State University of New York at Albany. During that time, she worked on the 2014 i2b2 Natural Language Processing Shared Task, which focused on recognizing risk factors for heart disease in medical records, as well as the identification and removal of personal information about patients from their records.
Amber joined Simmons as an Assistant Professor at Simmons University in 2014, and became as Associate Professor in 2020. She is delighted to be back at Simmons, and enjoys helping students understand technology and how to make it work for them.
Courses
- CS110: Foundations of Information Technology
- CS112: Introduction to Computer Science
- CS232: Data Structures and Algorithms
- CS330: Structure and Organization of Programming Languages
Research/Creative Activities
Stubbs' research is primarily in natural language processing. She is especially interested in best practices for the annotation all types of high-level information, and is currently working on a project involving Verb Phrase Ellipsis with Lotus Goldberg.
Shout-outs from Students and Alums
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While completing her computer science degree, Jazzmine White '17 was encouraged by her professors to do more, and do it well. Now as a full-stack software engineer at Cisco, White has the tenacity to take an idea and run with it.
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