2 minutes with: Laurie Lawson

Translating is Laurie Lawson’s (MInfoSci’24; PhD’26) thing—whether it’s looking at archival posts in Arabic, making her research more accessible or teaching Copilot to make emails sound more professional. We asked the language engineer about the work she does for Microsoft. 

Photo by Glenn Asakawa

Responses edited for length and clarity.

  First, congrats on graduating! Since it’s so fresh, what will you miss about CMDI?
One thing I’ve loved is people’s excitement about learning new things. For instance, I took a communication class that taught me a lot about different perspectives and passions.

  Seems like you’re passionate about language. Why?
I lived in Jordan during a study abroad program and fell in love with Arabic. While I was there, I heard a lot of stories about events like the Arab Spring from a completely different perspective.

  Interesting. How does that tie into your professional interests?
There’s been work done on the Arab Spring from fields like linguistic anthropology, communication studies and human-computer interaction. My information science background challenged me to bring in a new perspective of the cross-language Arabic and all those different disciplines.

  So, the big news: You landed a job at Microsoft. Congratulations! What do you do?
I’m a language engineer, so I think about how users interact with Copilot. If you ever ask Copilot to draft an email and you don’t like it, send me a message, because that’s what I’m working on.

  Last one—thoughts on A.I.?
I don’t think its integration into our workflows is going away, but how we engage with it is incredibly important. CMDI encouraged me to think critically about how technology is situated within not just our society, but the world.

Hannah Stewart graduated in 2019 with a degree in communication. She covers student news at the college.