Mihai Surdeanu
About
Mihai Surdeanu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona, where he directs the Cognitive Language Understanding (CLU) Lab. His research lies at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and applied machine learning, with a distinct focus on building interpretable AI systems that can explain their reasoning in human-understandable terms. Dr. Surdeanu is particularly recognized for his work on information extraction, question answering, and "machine reading" for scientific discovery—applications that range from uncovering cancer pathways for DARPA to identifying child health trends for the Gates Foundation. As a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Lum AI, he bridges academia and industry by commercializing neuro-symbolic technologies that combine the precision of rule-based systems with the flexibility of large language models (LLMs). He earned his Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University and previously served as a senior research scientist at Stanford University.
Research Performance Summary
First Recorded Paper
SVMs for the Temporal Expresión Chunking Problem
Year: 1997
Citations: 2
Venue: N/A
Latest Recorded Paper
A Lightweight Explainable Guardrail for Prompt Safety
Year: 2026
Citations: 0
Venue: arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15853
Last 10 Years Publication Activity
This timeline shows the professor's yearly publication activity.