Rate My Professor Peter Jansen

Peter Jansen is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona, holding a joint appointment with the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He earned a Ph.D. in Psychology and Neuroscience from McMaster University in 2010 and a Bachelor of Independent Studies in Physics and Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, with a Cognitive Science option, from the University of Waterloo in 2005. Jansen's career includes postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Arizona's Natural Language Processing Lab in the School of Information and the Lab for Engineering Non-Traditional Sensors in Electrical Engineering from 2010 to 2013, a position as Senior Artificial Intelligence Engineer at Scanadu Inc. from 2012 to 2013, and progressive roles at the University of Arizona leading to his current faculty appointment. He maintains courtesy affiliations in Linguistics and is cross-listed in Computer Science.

Jansen's research focuses on natural language processing, artificial intelligence, automated inference, semantic knowledge representation, question answering, explainable inference, cognitive science, virtual world simulators, and applications in automated scientific reasoning and discovery. Notable publications include 'Framing Question Answering as Building and Ranking Answer Justifications' (Computational Linguistics, 2017), 'Higher-order Lexical Semantic Models for Non-factoid Answer Reranking' (Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2015), 'WorldTree V2: A Corpus of Science-Domain Structured Explanations and Inference Patterns supporting Multi-Hop Inference' (LREC, 2020), 'QASC: A Dataset for Question Answering via Sentence Composition' (AAAI, 2020), 'ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?' (EMNLP, 2022), and 'DISCOVERYWORLD: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agents' (NeurIPS, 2024). His datasets and benchmarks, such as EntailmentBank, TextWorldExpress, and Explanation Bank, support multi-hop inference and scientific question answering. With over 2,498 citations on Google Scholar, his work influences AI reasoning research. Awards include his open-source science tricorder placed on permanent exhibit at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin in 2015, the Hebb Student Award runner-up in 2010, and scholarships from Ontario and McMaster University. Jansen delivered an invited TEDxBrussels talk in 2012, and his projects have appeared in over 50 media outlets including Reuters, Forbes, WIRED, MSNBC, and the Washington Post.