ITHACA, N.Y. -- Two members of the Cornell University faculty have been awarded Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships. They are Lillian Lee and Andrew Myers, both assistant professors of computer science.

The two are among 104 young scientists and economists selected as 2002 Sloan fellows, representing faculty from 53 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. The fellowships, totaling $4.16 million this year, allow scientists to continue their research with awards of $40,000 each over two years. Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them.

Lee received her A.B. from Cornell in 1993 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1997. Her research is focused on developing techniques that would enable computers to understand and use human language effectively, robustly and gracefully. The complex subtleties of language phenomena mean that this goal cannot be achieved without access to large quantities of high-quality linguistic and background knowledge, she says. Lee has been working on new tools to allow computers to extract this information from essentially raw text, in applications ranging from automatically constructing thesauruses, to finding word boundaries in streams of Japanese text, to creating English versions of computer-generated mathematical proofs.

Myers received his B.S. in physics and computer science at Stanford University in 1988 and an M.S. in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1999 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the Cornell faculty in January 1999. He has worked at DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, Calif., and Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, Calif. Earlier this year he received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. His research concentrates on computer security, and particularly on ways a computer user can be sure that programs with access to confidential data will follow rules set by the user in handling that data. He is creating special "security-typed" programming languages, allowing the host computer to verify that the program will do only what it claims to do.

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