Starting one's own venture not only is gutsy but also requires discipline and resourcefulness. In this panel, several entrepreneurs and an NSF program director whose focus is to foster the U.S. entrepreneurial ecosystem will share their experience and guidance for current and future entrepreneurs.
Dr. Michelle Zhou is a Co-Founder and CEO of Juji, Inc., an Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup located in Silicon Valley, specializing in building responsible and empathetic AI agents that can deeply understand users and guide their behavior based on their psychological characteristics. Prior to starting Juji, Michelle led the User Systems and Experience Research (USER) group at IBM Research – Almaden and then the IBM Watson Group. Michelle’s expertise is in the interdisciplinary area of intelligent user interaction (IUI), including conversational systems and personality analytics. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed, refereed articles and filed over 40 patents. Michelle is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) and an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST). She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University and is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
Dr. Catherine Havasi is a technology strategist, artificial intelligence researcher, and entrepreneur. In the late 90s, she co-founded the Common Sense Computing Initiative, or ConceptNet, the first crowd-sourced project for artificial intelligence and the largest open knowledge graph for language understanding. ConceptNet has played a role in thousands of AI projects and will be turning 20 next year. She is a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Luminoso, which helps companies get value from customer service data. She was honored as one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in business. She is currently a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab where she works on computational creativity and previously directed the Digital Intuition group at the Media Lab. She did her PhD at Brandeis University with James Pustejovsky.
Dr. W. Lewis Johnson is President and CEO of Alelo, a developer of AI-driven learning products and services used in dozens of countries around the world. Dr. Johnson is an internationally recognized expert in AI education. For his work on the first Alelo immersive game, Tactical Iraqi, he won DARPA’s Significant Technical Achievement Award. He has been a past President of the International AI in Education Society and was co-winner of the 2017 Autonomous Agents Influential Paper Award for his work in the field of pedagogical agents. He has been invited to speak at many international conferences such as the International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and presented a Distinguished Lecture at the National Science Foundation. The company he co-founded, Alelo, was named one of the 10 Most Trusted Simulation Solution Providers in 2018. Lewis and his wife Kim also grow coffee in Kona and have been frequent finalists in the annual Kona Coffee Cupping Competition.
Dr. Nancy Kamei is an NSF Program Director with the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships to serve the United States’ entrepreneurial ecosystem since 2017. She focuses on Medical Devices and Digital Health. For several years, she served as a National Instructor for the Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) program, interacting with NSF and National Institutes of Health grantees, which inspired her to join the SBIR/STTR Program and continue working with innovators and entrepreneurs. Nancy has more than 20 years of experience as an investor, having selected and managed billions of dollars of investments of both public equities (Capital Group Companies) and venture capital (Intel Capital). She is also a serial entrepreneur, having been on the founding team of several Silicon Valley startups (Onyx Pharmaceuticals). After receiving her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from University of California, San Francisco, she started her career at Merck and then completed her Master of Business Administration at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Nancy also has more than 40 years of service to the non-profit sector. She recently relocated to the Washington, D.C. area after a lifetime in California.
Each year, the IUI organizing committee acknowledges one past IUI paper that had the most impact and highest visibility since being published. This year, the committee has selected "SUPPLE: Automatically Generating User Interfaces" by Krzysztof Gajos and Dan Weld to receive the award. In this panel, several experts will reflect the contributions of the paper and discuss its impact to the IUI community.
Dr. Simone Stumpf is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at City, University of London, UK, in the Centre for HCI Design. She has a long-standing research focus on user interactions with machine learning systems and has authored over 60 publications in this area. Her current projects include investigating sensor-based health self-care systems for people with dementia and Parkinson’s disease, personal health information management for people living with HIV, and interactions with smart heating system. Her work has contributed to shaping the field of Explainable AI (XAI) through the Explanatory Debugging approach to interactive machine learning, providing design principles for crafting explanations. She has co-organised workshops on Explainable Smart Systems (ExSS) at IUI 2018 and 2019. The prime aim of her work is to empower all users to use intelligent machines effectively.
Dr. Henry Lieberman is a Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he works on AI and computer-human interaction. For several decades, he was at the MIT Media Lab, where he ran the Software Agents group. Some of the topics of his research have been interface agents, commonsense reasoning, story understanding, programming by example, debugging, parallelism and knowledge representation. He has published over 120 articles. His latest book, "Why Can't We All Just Get Along?" is a radical and optimistic vision of the future of AI, technology and society. He was twice Program Chair of IUI, and has served on the senior Program Committee for IUI continuously for many years. He has published many times in IUI, and received the 2018 Impact Award. He also served on an ACM Oversight committee for IUI. He is an Associate Editor, and on the Advisory Board, of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems (TiiS), the ACM journal in which many IUI-themed papers appear. He also writes the TiiS blog.
Dr. Jeffrey Nichols is a Staff Research Scientist at Google, where he leads development of the user interface framework for the next generation Fuchsia operating system. He received his Ph.D. from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, where his thesis was on the topic of automatic generation of user interfaces. He has published numerous papers in IUI, and was papers co-chair of IUI 2013, general co-chair of IUI 2016, and is chair-elect of the IUI steering committee.
During the past few years, AI has been resurrected and become the "darling" subject of research and development in Computer Science. On the one hand, startups, enterprises, and academia alike have invested heavily in AI research and applications. On the other hand, AI "accidents" come out one after another. In this panel, several experts and leaders in AI research and practice will discuss the AI reality, especially what we should expect when AI meets humans in the real world.
Dr. Catherine Havasi is a technology strategist, artificial intelligence researcher, and entrepreneur. In the late 90s, she co-founded the Common Sense Computing Initiative, or ConceptNet, the first crowd-sourced project for artificial intelligence and the largest open knowledge graph for language understanding. ConceptNet has played a role in thousands of AI projects and will be turning 20 next year. She is a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Luminoso, which helps companies get value from customer service data. She was honored as one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in business. She is currently a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab where she works on computational creativity and previously directed the Digital Intuition group at the Media Lab. She did her PhD at Brandeis University with James Pustejovsky.
Dr. W. Lewis Johnson is President and CEO of Alelo, a developer of AI-driven learning products and services used in dozens of countries around the world. Dr. Johnson is an internationally recognized expert in AI education. For his work on the first Alelo immersive game, Tactical Iraqi, he won DARPA’s Significant Technical Achievement Award. He has been a past President of the International AI in Education Society and was co-winner of the 2017 Autonomous Agents Influential Paper Award for his work in the field of pedagogical agents. He has been invited to speak at many international conferences such as the International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and presented a Distinguished Lecture at the National Science Foundation. The company he co-founded, Alelo, was named one of the 10 Most Trusted Simulation Solution Providers in 2018. Lewis and his wife Kim also grow coffee in Kona and have been frequent finalists in the annual Kona Coffee Cupping Competition.
Dr. Danny Lange is Vice President of AI and Machine Learning at Unity Technologies where he leads multiple initiatives in the field of applied Artificial Intelligence. Unity is the creator of a flexible and high-performance end-to-end development platform used to create rich interactive 2D, 3D, VR and AR experiences. Previously, Danny was Head of Machine Learning at Uber, where he led the efforts to build a highly scalable Machine Learning platform to support all parts of Uber’s business from the Uber App to self-driving cars. Before joining Uber, Danny was General Manager of Amazon Machine Learning providing internal teams with access to machine intelligence. He also launched an AWS product that offers Machine Learning as a Cloud Service to the public. Prior to Amazon, he was Principal Development Manager at Microsoft where he led a product team focused on large-scale Machine Learning for Big Data. Danny spent 8 years on Speech Recognition Systems, first as CTO of General Magic, Inc., and then as founder of his own company, Vocomo Software. During this time, he was working on General Motor’s OnStar Virtual Advisor, one of the largest deployments of an intelligent personal assistant until Siri. Danny started his career as a Computer Scientist at IBM Research. Danny holds MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark. He is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society and has numerous patents to his credit.
Haixun Wang is Vice President of Engineering and Distinguished Scientist at WeWork and an IEEE fellow. Before joining WeWork, he was a Director of Natural Language Processing at Amazon. From 2015 to 2017, he led the NLP organization in Facebook working on query and document understanding. From 2013 to 2015, he was with Google Research, working on natural language processing. From 2009 to 2013, he led research in knowledge bases, graph systems, and text processing at Microsoft Research Asia. He had been a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2000 – 2009. He was Technical Assistant to Stuart Feldman (Vice President of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2006 to 2007, and TechnicalAssistant to Mark Wegman (Head of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2007 to 2009. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. He has published more than 200 research papers in international journals and conference proceedings. He served as PC chairs of many academic conferences, and he is on the editorial board of journals such as IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST). He won the best paper award in ICDE 2015, 10-year best paper award in ICDM 2013, and best paper award of ER 2009.