Fernando Pereira is research director at Google. His previous appointments include chair of the Computer and Information Science department at University of Pennsylvania, head of the Machine Learning and Information Retrieval department at AT&T Labs, and research and management positions at SRI International. He received a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1982. His main research interests are in machine-learnable models of language and biological sequences. He has over 100 research publications on computational linguistics, machine learning, bioinformatics, speech recognition, and logic programming, and several patents. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1991 for his contributions to computational linguistics and logic programming, and he was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.