CCC Senior Advisor Allen Gorin, who passed away on October 14, 2023, led groundbreaking research in the field of natural language processing during a 21-year career at AT&T, and then, after the tragedy of 9/11, as director of the Human Language Technology Research Lab at the U.S. Department of Defence. His work in automated language understanding systems led to breakthroughs that advanced the understanding of how computers can understand human speech and helped pave the way for today’s voice recognition platforms. He was awarded the AT&T Science and Technology Medal in 2002 and named an IEEE Fellow in 2005. His longstanding connection to MIT, and specifically to CCC Director Deb Roy, dated back to Roy’s graduate student days, and continued for many years as he served as a generous mentor to both Roy and his students, and as a key figure in creating the intellectual foundation for CCC.