Dr. Janet M. Hitzeman

She went on to earn a doctor of philosophy in linguistics and computer science from the University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y., in 1993.

After her doctorate, Dr. Hitzeman became a research fellow at Scotland's University of Edinburgh until joining MITRE in the spring of 2000. At MITRE, she was a senior artificial intelligence engineer with the Human Language Technology department. Throughout her career, Dr. Hitzeman worked on a wide range of computational linguistics challenges. Much of Janet's work at MITRE concentrated on information extraction on financial texts, chat room logs, and most recently, leading a successful project that automatically extracted events related to global disease monitoring. Dr. Hitzeman also helped develop SpatialML, a standard for extracting spatial locations from text. She authored or co-authored many papers and conference presentations on the temporal structure of discourse, co-reference, speech synthesis, event extraction and multilingual information extraction.

Janet was beloved by many friends across the globe. She is remembered for her positivity, her generosity and, most of all, her brilliantly dry wit. Her core sense of fairness, kindness, humor and openness infused every relationship. She is sorely missed. The daughter of Eugene Hitzeman and Miriam Kuehn Hitzeman, Janet is survived by her mother, her brother Arthur and her sister Sarah, all of California. Her father predeceased her in 2006.