Lyle Ungar
Also known as Lyle H. Ungar
Lyle Ungar is a Penn computer scientist whose AI research connects language analysis, social data, and human responses to chatbots. He earned a B.S. at Stanford and a Ph.D. at MIT, then joined Penn in 1984; by 2002, he directed its technology management program. He co-founded Penn's World Well-Being Project in 2011 and published Eigenwords, a method for learning word embeddings, in 2015. AAAS named him a Leshner Fellow in 2020, and a paper he co-authored in 2025 studies how people perceive empathy in AI chatbots. As of October 2026, he is a Penn professor teaching Deep Learning At Scale.
- Works
- 654
- Citations
- 31,278
- h-index
- 88
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1984
Joining Penn after graduate study
He earns a B.S. at Stanford and a Ph.D. at MIT, then joins Penn in 1984.
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2002
Directing Penn's technology program
By 2002, he directs Penn Engineering's Executive Master in Technology Management Program, a role he holds for a decade.
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2011
Co-founding a well-being project
He co-founds the World Well-Being Project at Penn in 2011, a big-data psychology consortium.
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2013
Teaching artificial intelligence
In 2013, he is an associate professor at Penn and reshapes his Artificial Intelligence class with clicker feedback, small-group problem solving, and recorded videos.
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2015
Building Eigenwords
With Paramveer Dhillon and Dean Foster, he publishes Eigenwords in 2015, a set of fast spectral algorithms for learning word embeddings from context.
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2020
A Leshner Fellowship
AAAS names him a Leshner Fellow in 2020 for applying machine learning and text mining to social media messages about physical and mental health.
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2025
Studying chatbot empathy
He co-authors The Illusion of Empathy in 2025, a study of how chatbot identity and perceived empathy shape users' conversation experience.
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As of October 2026
Penn professor and AI educator
He is a professor of computer and information science at Penn and teaches Deep Learning At Scale in Fall 2026.
Sources and credits
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- How Machine Learning Builds Meaning from Our Chats, Tweets, and Likes: A Conversation with Dr. Lyle Ungar
- Penn & Hong Kong Engineering Schools Form Alliance
- People — World Well-Being Project
- Talk About Teaching and Learning
- Eigenwords: Spectral Word Embeddings
- Lyle Ungar: AAAS Leshner Fellow
- The Illusion of Empathy: How AI Chatbots Shape Conversation Perception
- Lyle Ungar — Operations, Information and Decisions Department