ADELPHI, Md. (Jan. 8, 2015) -- For almost three decades, U.S. Army Research Laboratory computer scientist Dr. Reginald Hobbs has made a tremendous impact in the field of information science as well as with his career as a science, technology, engineering and mathematics educator, and will be recognized with the Special Recognition award for his accomplishments at the 29th Black Engineer of the Year STEM Awards Conference.
Hobbs serves as the associate director for experimentation in the laboratory's Computational and Information Sciences Directorate and is an information sciences researcher with expertise in natural language processing components, network science, cognitive science and user-centered software design for text analytics and decision-making.
Among his accomplishments, Hobbs developed text-processing technology using open-source NLP tools to rapidly construct statistical machine translation engines, language models and post-editors from parallel text.
He also introduced an extreme programming approach for developing custom applications to assist human foreign language translators.
Most recently, Hobbs has been heavily involved in CISD's network science program, developing an experimentation framework and prototype system that uses intelligent agents for improving quality of information across social, information and communication networks.
In addition to his work at the laboratory, Hobbs has been an adjunct professor for over 20 years at several historically black colleges and universities and major institutions, including a decade at Spelman College, the nation's oldest institution of higher education for black women.
Over the last two years while serving as an adjunct professor at Howard University, he has been a faculty mentor for the Advancing Robotics Teaching for Societal Impact Alliance, or ARTSI, program, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, where he teaches behavior-based robotics programming and collaborates on the university's involvement in the program.
"It is both humbling and gratifying to have been selected for special recognition by the BEYA STEM Conference committee. It means that they felt that my accomplishments as a researcher and STEM educator have had an impact in influencing young people into science and engineering," Hobbs said.
"One of the biggest motivators for encouraging participation in any activity is witnessing the success of someone you identify with in that activity. That is the reason that athletes and entertainers are de facto role models. I would like to think that sharing my achievements as a scientist through this selection for a BEYA STEM award presents another type of person to emulate," Hobbs said.
Hobbs added that conferences such as BEYA STEM are venues where science and engineering positions are exhibited to attendees from minority or other underserved groups as viable career paths.
The 29th BEYA STEM Awards Conference will be held in February in Washington, D.C.
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