Professor at CMU pioneered language technologies research
JAIME CARBONELL | July 29, 1953 - Feb. 28, 2020
As a researcher, entrepreneur and professor, Jaime Carbonell recognized early on that technology could be used to connect the world.
Credited by one colleague as the “godfather of language technologies,” Mr. Carbonell spent his career learning new ways to help people communicate, regardless of the language they spoke.
His 40-year tenure at Carnegie Mellon University resulted in more than $100 million in research grants and contracts, 400 publications, several spinoff companies and the creation of an entirely new department in the School of Computer Science.
“Jaime always did a really good job of moving into the new paradigm when there was some big revolution in the field,” said Robert Frederking, associate dean of doctoral programs at CMU’s School of Computer Science and a former student of Mr. Carbonell.
“One of our colleagues one time said the kind of surprising thing is that Jaime really was smarter than the rest of us,” Mr. Frederking said. “The artificial intelligence faculty here are pretty smart, but if you would go to Jaime with some tricky problem, he would actually come up with good new ideas for any problem that you tossed at him.”
Mr. Carbonell, who lived in Squirrel Hill, died on Feb. 28 at age 66 from colon cancer. Despite his illness, he never really pulled back on his work at CMU, making sure to continue mentoring his graduate and doctoral students, said his sister Ana Maria Carbonell.
“I think he’s really inspired and mentored a lot of work, and his work is being carried forth,” Ms. Carbonell said. “He was a trouper through it all. … He’s a scientist, so he carried on and was doing what he had to do.”
Mr. Carbonell was born in Uruguay, and his family immigrated to Boston when he was 9 years old because of his father’s work in computer science. Jaime was proud of his heritage, Ms. Carbonell said, and often returned to Uruguay for work or to visit a friend he had known since elementary school.
As a family, the Carbonells liked to take tourist-attraction-filled road trips, driving cross-country in a van on one trip and down to Mexico on another.
When Ana Maria was 11 and Jaime was 19, their father died suddenly from a heart arrhythmia. The oldest of five children, Jaime took on a lot of responsibility to help their mother handle the finances and the family, Ms. Carbonell said. Years later, the siblings would also lose a younger sister suddenly when she was 47.
In the past few years, Ana Maria, Jaime and their two brothers, Pablo and Miguel, talked often in group text messages, checking in about their mom, sending updates about children and grandchildren and sharing family jokes. In person, Mr. Carbonell could always make the family laugh, bringing up “absurd family lore” that would have everyone cracking up.
As an academic, he was “well-rounded,” Ms. Carbonell said. He loved astronomy, literature and chess and passed his skill in the game along to Ms. Carbonell’s son, his daughter Isabelle Carbonell and recently to his 6-year-old grandson, Teo.
As a father, Mr. Carbonell always supported his four children and helped them work through big life decisions, such buying a house or deciding to pursue a doctorate on their own, Isabelle said. While she was growing up, Isabelle said, her father could always answer a math or physics problem, whether he was driving in the car or riding in an elevator.
After moving for his job at CMU, Mr. Carbonell “never wavered in his love for Pittsburgh,” Ana Maria said. “He helped make Pittsburgh what it is.”
At CMU, Mr. Carbonell created the university’s doctorate program in language technology and founded the Center for Machine Translation. Now called the Language Technologies Institute, the program is one of the seven academic units in the School of Computer Science and has almost 400 graduate students.
He was one of the first to focus on machine translation, or using technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand and translate multiple languages. Applications like Google Translate are “the descendants of that work,” Mr. Frederking said.
One recent project focused on using artificial intelligence to analyze language used on social media, finding and separating what the researchers call “help speech” from “hate speech.”
In 2015, Mr. Carbonell was awarded the Okawa Prize, an international recognition for people who have made outstanding contributions to the information and telecommunications field.
Always on the cutting edge, Mr. Carbonell also coauthored one of the first textbooks on machine learning and co-founded one of the first projects to start digitizing print books and other reading materials.
“Fundamentally, he never talked about what he did. That wasn’t his style at all,” said Michael Shamos, a professor in the Language Technologies Institute who has known Mr. Carbonell since his graduate school days at Yale.
“What he did was he put the right people together and encouraged them to solicit the right funding and grants from the government to move the agenda forward,” Mr. Shamos said. “The agenda always was how can we make language processing better than it was last week.”
Jamie Callan, a professor in the Language Technologies Institute, will serve as interim director of the department.
Mr. Carbonell is survived by his longtime partner, Yiming Yang, of Pittsburgh; his mother, Nellie Carbonell, of Concord, Mass.; a sister, Ana Maria Carbonell, of Berkeley, Calif.; two brothers, Miguel Carbonell, of Medford, Ore., and Pablo Carbonell, of Harvard, Mass.; three daughters, Diana Carbonell, of Pittsburgh; Isabelle Carbonell of Santa Cruz, Calif.; and Rachel Carbonell of Brooklyn, N.Y.; a son, Ruben Carbonell of Southbridge, Mass.; and two grandchildren, Teo and Audrey Carbonell.
Funeral arrangements are pending. Carnegie Mellon University is also making plans for a campus remembrance.