Barbara Partee has been awarded the 2020 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. The award statement from https://www.fi.edu/laureates/barbara-partee is copied below. Here is an excerpt from the Award’s “about” page:

Through its Awards Program, The Franklin Institute seeks to provide public recognition and encouragement of excellence in science and technology. The list of Franklin Institute laureates reads like a “Who’s Who” in the history of 19th, 20th, and 21st century science, including Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Rudolf Diesel, Pierre and Marie Curie, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Frank Lloyd Wright…

This richly deserved award is a great testament to Barbara’s impact on the field, and we could add, our department and University. Since the area of the award is Computer and Cognitive Science, it’s worth noting that we owe much of our University’s current strength in Cognitive Science to Barbara, who with Michael Arbib of Computer Science co-directed the initiative that obtained the two rounds of Sloan Foundation funding that involved multiple faculty members and sowed the seeds for the development of this interdisciplinary area.

Congratulations Barbara!

Citation: For her foundational contributions that synthesize insights from linguistics, philosophy, logic, and psychology to understand how words and sentences combine to express meaning in human language.

A teacher, scholar, and thinker as original and wide-ranging as Barbara Partee is rare. Currently professor emerita of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Partee is one of the pioneers of the burgeoning field of linguistics, a field that has had broad impacts on everything from psychology to artificial intelligence. In particular, Partee has been instrumental in forging new connections between formal logic and natural language. Language is ultimately a code, encoded by a speaker to be interpreted by a listener. Partee applies concepts in logic and semantics to untangle that code. Her work opened a new field of linguistics—she is considered the founder of formal semantics. Partee’s contributions to understanding language, in a way that envelops linguistics, philosophy, logic, and psychology, have been key shaping concepts in computer science and cognitive science.