“Exactly the Most Exciting Time”: Penn Engineering’s Chris Callison-Burch on 25 Years of AI Innovation AI / November 21, 2025 Share: Author: Penn Engineering Online Artificial intelligence may feel like a recent revolution, but for Chris Callison-Burch, Program Director of the online Master of Science in Engineering in Artificial Intelligence (MSE-AI Online) degree program, it’s the culmination of a 25-year journey – one that shows how breakthroughs happen when technology, data, and vision align. His AI story starts in the late 1990s, spans multiple paradigm shifts, and culminates in a moment he calls “exactly the most exciting time to get into this field.” “Artificial intelligence has a very long history… the term itself was coined in the 1950s.” — Chris Callison-Burch The Spark: Language, Logic, and an Interdisciplinary Launch Callison-Burch traces his entry into AI to 1999, when a visiting-day presentation at Stanford during his senior year of high school introduced him to the Symbolic Systems Program—an interdisciplinary blend of computer science, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy centered on how humans and machines communicate. During his undergrad at Stanford, Callison-Burch immersed himself equally in linguistics and computer science, drawn to the challenge of enabling computers to use human language with human-level proficiency. “I was all in as a high school senior when I learned about a program that blended linguistics with computer science, and I never looked back.” — Chris Callison-Burch Between undergrad and graduate school, he joined a company during the early internet boom, licensing machine translation software from multiple vendors and building a translation system that could scale to the internet. When his proposal for the company to build its own machine translation systems using statistical machine learning was declined, he pivoted to graduate research. Read More at Penn Engineering Online Read More Two Penn Engineers Receive Kaufman Foundation Grants
