Regina Barzilay

Regina Barzilay (; born 1970) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.

Early life and education Barzilay was born in Chișinău, Moldova, and emigrated to Israel with her parents at the age of 20.

Career and research After her PhD, she spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. She was appointed as Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2016. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, which prompted her to conduct research in oncology. Barzilay won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.

For her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, she led the development of Newsblaster, which recognized stories from different news sources as being about the same basic subject, and then paraphrased elements from the stories to create a summary.

In computational linguistics, Barzilay created algorithms that learned annotations from common languages (i.e. English) to analyze less understood languages.

Prompted by her experience with breast cancer, Barzilay is applying machine learning to oncology. She is collaborating with physicians and students to devise deep learning models that utilize images, text, and structured data to identify trends that affect early diagnosis, treatment, and disease prevention.

Frontline Documentary

Following her battle with breast cancer in 2014, and her researching into applying artificial intelligence to improve early detection methods, she collaborated with Dr. Connie Lehman at Massachusetts General Hospital. While there Barzilay developed an AI-based system capable of predicting the likelihood of breast cancer up to five years in advance. The system leverages deep learning techniques to analyze mammograms and diagnostic notes, surpassing traditional pattern recognition by human radiologists. This breakthrough, while still in development, has the potential to significantly enhance early diagnosis and treatment outcomes.

Barzilay's work in this area was featured in the FRONTLINE documentary In the Age of AI, which explores the broader impact of artificial intelligence on society.

MIT Jameel Clinic In 2018, Barzilay was appointed faculty lead for AI at the new MIT Jameel Clinic, a research center in the field of AI health sciences, including disease detection, drug discovery, and the development of medical devices. In 2020, she was part of the team—with fellow MIT Jameel Clinic faculty lead Professor James J. Collins—that announced the discovery through deep learning of halicin, the first new antibiotic compound for 30 years, which kills over 35 powerful bacteria, including antimicrobial-resistant tuberculosis, the superbug C. difficile, and two of the World Health Organization's top-three most deadly bacteria. In 2020, Collins, Barzilay and the MIT Jameel Clinic were also awarded funding through The Audacious Project to expand on the discovery of halicin in using AI to respond to the antibiotic resistance crisis through the development of new classes of antibiotics.

Awards and recognition In 2017, Barzilay won the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the "Genius Grant", for "developing machine learning methods that enable computers to process and analyze vast amounts of human language data." Her teaching has also been recognized by MIT as she won the Jamieson Teaching Award in 2016. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.