PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mary Harper

Also known as Mary P. Harper, Mary Patricia Harper

Mary Harper was a computer scientist in speech and language technology who conceived and led IARPA's Babel program, which built speech recognition for keyword search in new languages with limited transcribed speech. After studying psychology, she earned a computer science PhD at Brown in 1990 and taught in Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1989 to 2007. At IARPA, she was also program manager for the ASpIRE challenge on recognizing speech recorded in noisy, reverberant rooms, and the International Speech Communication Association named her a Fellow in 2016 for leadership in low-resource and robust speech processing. Her final post was deputy chief scientist of the US Army Research Laboratory, and she retired in December 2018. In October 2026, she died in Falls Church, Virginia, at age 70.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 1955–1990

    Psychology, then computer science

    Born in Buffalo, New York, in November 1955, she earns a BA in psychology at Kent State University in 1976 and an MS in psychology at the University of Massachusetts in 1980. At Brown University, she completes an MS in computer science in 1986 and a PhD in 1990 with the dissertation "The Representation of Noun Phrases in Logical Form".

  2. 1989–2007

    Professor at Purdue

    From 1989 to 2007, she is a professor in Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research models human communication by combining lexical, syntactic, prosodic and visual knowledge sources. With Wen Wang, she publishes the SuperARV language model at EMNLP in 2002, and in 2005 she coauthors an ACL paper with Yang Liu, Andreas Stolcke and Elizabeth Shriberg on conditional random fields for sentence boundary detection in speech.

  3. 2002–2010

    NSF, CASL and Johns Hopkins

    From 2002 to 2005, she serves as a rotating program director at the National Science Foundation while continuing her research at Purdue. She joins the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language as a senior research scientist in 2005 and directs its Technology Use sub-area from 2006 to 2008. From 2008 to 2010, as a principal research scientist, she works with researchers at the Johns Hopkins HLT Center of Excellence on next-generation human language technologies.

  4. 2013–2014

    Leading IARPA's Babel program

    By 2013, she is a program manager in IARPA's Incisive Analysis office, where she conceives and leads Babel, a program to rapidly build speech recognition for keyword search in new languages with limited transcribed speech. Performer teams first work on Cantonese, Pashto, Tagalog and Turkish, then get four weeks to build systems for a surprise language, Vietnamese. In 2014, she publishes "Learning from 26 Languages: Program Management and Science in the Babel Program" in the COLING proceedings.

  5. 2014–2015

    The ASpIRE challenge

    In November 2014, IARPA launches the Automatic Speech recognition in Reverberant Environments (ASpIRE) challenge, with Harper as program manager, to find systems that work on speech recorded in noisy, echoing rooms. In September 2015, IARPA names the winners: teams from Johns Hopkins University, Raytheon BBN Technologies, the Institute for Infocomm Research and Brno University of Technology share $110,000 in prizes.

  6. 2016

    An ISCA Fellowship

    In 2016, the International Speech Communication Association names her a Fellow for leadership in the development of low-resource and robust speech processing technologies. She joins the ISCA Fellows class at the INTERSPEECH 2016 opening ceremony.

  7. 2017–2018

    Deputy chief scientist at ARL

    In August 2017, as deputy chief scientist of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, she attends the Defense Department's Science, Technology and Innovation exchange in Crystal City, Virginia. She finishes her career in the role and retires in December 2018.

  8. October 2026

    Death at 70

    She dies in Falls Church, Virginia, in October 2026, at age 70, after a career with more than 170 publications.

Career

  1. 2017–2018United States Army Research LaboratoryDeputy chief scientist
  2. From 2013Intelligence Advanced Research Projects ActivityProgram manager
  3. 2008–2010Johns Hopkins UniversityPrincipal research scientist
  4. 2005–2008University of MarylandSenior research scientist; director of Technology Use sub-area
  5. 2002–2005National Science FoundationRotating program director
  6. 1989–2007Purdue UniversityProfessor

Education

  1. 1990Brown UniversityPhD in computer science
  2. 1986Brown UniversityMS in computer science
  3. 1980University of Massachusetts AmherstMS in psychology
  4. 1976Kent State UniversityBA in psychology

From the biography.

  1. Of 216 AI researchers who entered public life, 83 held advisory seats and 58 took public rolesIncludes National Science Foundation. Of 216 AI researchers who entered public life, 83 held advisory seats and 58 took public roles. Another 97 people moved from public careers into AI organizations or research, with 62% of dated records starting from 2020 on.
  2. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes University of Maryland. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Johns Hopkins University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Purdue University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Mary Patricia Harper - Money & King moneyandking.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. The Babel Program and Low Resource Speech Technology | ASRU 2013 - video recordings and slides superlectures.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Mary Harper - The Mathematics Genealogy Project mathgenealogy.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. The SuperARV Language Model: Investigating the Effectiveness of Tightly Integrating Multiple Knowledge Sources - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Using Conditional Random Fields for Sentence Boundary Detection in Speech - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Learning from 26 Languages: Program Management and Science in the Babel Program - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. What Happens When Spies Can Eavesdrop on Any Conversation? - Defense One defenseone.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. IARPA announces winners of its ASpIRE challenge - Intelligence Community News intelligencecommunitynews.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. ISCA - ISCA Fellow Program isca-speech.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. DVIDS - News - Army researchers participate in DOD's first TED talk dvidshub.net. Checked 20 October 2026.