PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Chris Callison-Burch

Chris Callison-Burch is a computer and information science professor whose work spans machine translation, paraphrase, and multimodal AI. His education at Stanford and Edinburgh led into language research at Johns Hopkins and a Penn faculty career. At AI2, he coauthored Molmo, an open family of vision-language models that received a 2025 CVPR Best Paper Honorable Mention. As of October 2026, he is Penn’s Raj and Neera Singh Professor and directs its online AI master’s program.

Timeline

  1. 2000–2008

    Training in language and computing

    He earns a BS with honors in symbolic systems at Stanford, then an MS with distinction in computer science and a PhD in informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

  2. 2007–2013

    Machine translation with paraphrases

    At Johns Hopkins, he moves from assistant to associate research professor before joining Penn in 2013 as an Aravind K. Joshi Term Assistant Professor. His 2009 paper links monolingual paraphrases with statistical machine translation, and he coauthors the 2013 paper PPDB: The Paraphrase Database.

  3. 2014

    A Sloan research fellowship

    He receives a Sloan Research Fellowship.

  4. 2015–2017

    Guiding conference programs

    He serves as Program Co-Chair for EMNLP 2015 and General Chair for ACL 2017.

  5. 2023–2024

    Opening up vision-language models

    While a visiting research scientist at AI2, he coauthors Molmo and PixMo, an open family of vision-language models.

  6. 2025

    A CVPR paper honor

    Molmo and PixMo receives a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CVPR 2025.

  7. As of October 2026

    A chair for AI and language

    Penn names him the Raj and Neera Singh Professor in Computer and Information Science, and he directs Penn Engineering Online’s master of science in engineering in artificial intelligence. His current work spans large language models, reasoning, verification, model evaluation, AI-generated text, machine translation, paraphrasing, crowdsourcing, multilingual language technologies, and multimodal systems.

Sources and credits

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  1. Chris Callison-Burch: CV ccb.github.io. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Four Faculty Members in the School of Engineering & Applied Science Appointed to Endowed Chairs almanac.upenn.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Improved Statistical Machine Translation Using Monolingually-Derived Paraphrases aclanthology.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. PPDB: The Paraphrase Database aclanthology.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. 2023Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Director aclweb.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. [2409.17146] Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. CVPR 2025 Best Papers and Best Demos cvpr.thecvf.com. Checked 14 October 2026.