Prof. Martin Kay is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Stanford U. and Honorary Professor at Saarland U. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Kay then worked at Rand Corporation, the U. of Califormia at Irvine and XEROX PARC. Kay is one of the pioneers of computational linguistics and machine translation. He was responsible for introducing the notion of chart parsing in computational linguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics generally. With Ron Kaplan, he pioneered research and application development in finite-state morphology. He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation. In his seminal paper "The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation," Kay argued for MT systems that were tightly integrated in the human translation process. He was reviewer and critic of EUROTRA, Verbmobil, and many other MT projects. Kay is former Chair of the Association of Computational Linguistics and ungoing Chair of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics. He was a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until 2002. He holds an honorary doctorate of Gothenburg U. This year, Kay received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics for his sustained role as an intellectual leader of NLP research.