Francis Steen received an M.A. in English from the University of Oslo (Norway) and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been a Professor of Communications at UCLA since 2001. His research is focused on modeling cognitive processes in the media and developing computational methods for studying massive datasets of human communication. He has published in journals of linguistics, literary studies, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Steen co-directs Red Hen Lab, an international consortium for research into multimodal communication.