BU Today: Boston University’s Margrit Betke Remembered as a Brilliant Scholar, Devoted Mentor, Caring Colleague
Excerpt from BU Today | By: Sydney Gross | August 19, 2025 | Photo: Kalman Zabarsky
A few days before Margrit Betke died in August, her hospital room was crowded with colleagues and students who flew in from across the country. Neighbors brought flowers from her garden, and her former PhD students held her hand. “It was a good life,” she told them. “You were my children.”
“So many people loved her,” says Diane Hirsh Theriault (CAS’04, GRS’15), a software engineer at Google. “There are many people that are where they are, or who they are, today because of the way she touched their lives and set them on the path that they ended up walking… I certainly count myself among the people who experienced Margrit as a motherly, nurturing, loving mentor who cared deeply about her students.”
Betke, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of computer science, member of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, affiliated faculty member in the College of Engineering electrical & computer engineering, and core faculty member in the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, died on August 13. She was a pioneering computer scientist, an award-winning researcher, a beloved mentor, and an advocate for using technology to improve lives.
“Professor Betke exemplified the very best of our academic community—a brilliant scholar, a devoted mentor, and a compassionate colleague whose work has left a profound impact on both science and society,” says Gloria S. Waters, Boston University provost and chief academic officer. “Her legacy will continue to inspire students and researchers at Boston University and beyond.”
Betke also sought ways to use technology for the betterment of society. She worked to make AI more inclusive by enabling models that could work across diverse settings and populations and explored the role of AI in analyzing news and social media, addressing important issues of bias, equity, and ethics. She was a leader in cross-disciplinary initiatives such as the AI and Education Initiative at the Hariri Institute, exploring how AI can better support learning, including recent studies that used facial expressions to predict student math learning outcomes. She served as a principal investigator of large NSF-funded research projects, including development of intelligent tracking systems that reason about the group behavior, and on designing analytic methods for studying visual and textual public information, including news and social media.
“Her work exemplified what convergence in research is all about—a full decade before that term was coined,” notes Azer Bestavros, associate provost for computing and data sciences and William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer Science. “She always sought ways to use AI for the betterment of society and to improve the lives of people, and her ideas and work anticipated the AI for Good movement.”