Former NMSU CS Professor Dr. Janyce “Jan” Wiebe, most recently a professor with the University of Pittsburgh, passed away. Her advisee, Dr. Tom O’Hara, NMSU class of 2005, shares this:

It was incredibly disheartening to find out that Dr. Janyce Wiebe (“Jan”) died this past December after a struggle with leukemia. She taught at NMSU from 1992 to 2000. I worked under her as a graduate assistant for several years, and she was my Ph.D. advisor. Dr. Wiebe had a keen intellect and was a leading researcher in computational linguistics, in particular subjectivity analysis. Yet she was quite accessible and very friendly, with her characteristic good sense of humor. Moreover, she was active in the department and performed a variety of service-oriented roles even after obtaining tenure. She enjoyed teaching, including core computer science classes unrelated to artificial intelligence. With an undergraduate degree was in English, she was passionate about writing clearly, no matter how arcane the topic. I’ll forever appreciate her patience in helping me clarify my “cryptic” thesis.