Aravind Joshi born in 1929 in Pune, India did his under graduation in Electrical Engineering from University of Pune and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. He then worked as an engineer at RCA in Camden, New Jersey, from 1954-58, concurrently completing an M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He the did his PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently he is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science and Co-Director of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology.

He worked as assistant professor, then associate professor in the Electrical Engineering department until 1972, when a separate department of Computer and Information Science was created. He assumed the position of chair of the new department as full professor, a position he held until 1985. In 1979 he had co-founded the famous Cognitive Science Program at Penn, with Lila Gleitman, a psycholinguist. In 1983 he was awarded an endowed chair, the Henry Salvatori Professorship of Computer and Cognitive Sciences.

Aravind is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Fellow of IEEE and ACM, and Founding Fellow of AAAI. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His research interests are in the various areas of natural language processing computational modeling of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and discourse, mathematical linguistics, psycholinguistic implications of processing models, and applications to machine translation, question-answer systems and information extraction.

To his credit Aravind Joshi has supervised thirty-six Ph.D. theses to-date, on topics including information and coding theory, and also pure linguistics. He is the author of two books and 113 articles on computational linguistics