ALLEN INSTITUTE FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- VP of R & D at Samsung Mobile, Co - Founder and VP of Engineering at Viv Labs
David Forsyth Fulton Watson Copp Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Fellow of IEEE and ACM
Job Titles:
- Chief Executive Officer
- CEO of the Allen Institute for AI
Ali Farhadi is the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and a Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Ali has been a professor at the UW Allen School since 2012. He first joined AI2 in 2015 to lead the institute's computer vision research team with a focus on visual common-sense reasoning and the role of actions and interactions in visual understanding. While at AI2, he co-founded Xnor.ai, the first on-device deep learning startup that was acquired by Apple in 2020. Ali led Apple's next-generation machine learning efforts until 2023 when he rejoined AI2 as CEO in July. Ali's research impact has been globally recognized with several best paper awards at CVPR, NeruIPS, AAAI, NSF Career Award, and the Sloan Fellowship, and he was named one of Forbes's Top 5 AI Entrepreneurs in 2018.
Job Titles:
- Cauce President of the University of Washington
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- Predoctoral Young Investigator
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- Senior Research Scientist
- Research
- Research Scientist at AI2
- Senior Research Scientist at AI2
As a research scientist at AI2, Ashish works on semi-structured knowledge representations and scalable reasoning mechanisms, especially as they apply to question answering in complex domains such as project Aristo's science challenge. He is interested in building systems that have a formal underpinning and that can incorporate human insight and biases, learn from limited amounts of data, leverage large knowledge bases as easily as text corpora, and provide some form of explanation or reasoning supporting a conclusion. His research pushes the boundaries of inference techniques in combinatorial and probabilistic spaces, graphical models, and discrete optimization, and uses advances in these core methods to help solve key challenges in machine intelligence, particularly involving natural language understanding and reasoning.
Since 2006, Ashish has been a recipient of various Best Paper Awards (AAAI, CP, AKBC), a Best Student Paper Award (UAI), and Runner-up Prizes (UAI, IJCAI-JAIR 5-Year Best). As a practitioner, he was on the IBM team that won in SAT Competitions in 2011-2013. He is a member of various professional organizations, including AAAI, AAAS, ACL, ACM, and ACP, and a former member of INFORMS, CPNA, and NYAS.
Prior to joining AI2 in mid-2014, Ashish spent over three years at IBM Watson at the Business Analytics and Math Sciences department, transitioning into Smarter Energy Systems and Cognitive Algorithms over the years. During 2005-2010, he was at Cornell University, working closely with Profs. Carla Gomes and Bart Selman at the Intelligent Information Systems Institute (IISI) and as a major contributor to the $10M NSF proposal that led to the establishment of the Institute for Computational Sustainability. He spent several years in Seattle as a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington (advised by Profs. Paul Beame and Henry Kautz), after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kanpur) advised in part by Profs. Manindra Agrawal and Somnath Biswas.
As a Senior Research Scientist at AI2, Ashish is specializing in scalable and robust methods for probabilistic inference, graphical models, combinatorial reasoning, and discrete optimization. He is interested in pushing the boundaries of inference technology to help solve core challenges in machine intelligence, particularly NLP and vision. Prior to joining AI2, Ashish spent over three years at IBM Watson and five years at Cornell University, after obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2005.
Job Titles:
- Director of Strategic Industry Engagement, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing MIT Director of MIT - IBM Watson AI Lab Senior Research Scientist, MIT
Job Titles:
- Executive Director, Engineering
Job Titles:
- General Manager & Chief Scientist for Semantic Scholar
- Research
Dan is General Manager & Chief Scientist of Semantic Scholar at AI2 and Professor Emeritus at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. After formative education at Phillips Academy, he received bachelor's degrees in both Computer Science and Biochemistry at Yale University in 1982. He landed a Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1988, received a Presidential Young Investigator's award in 1989, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator's award in 1990, was named AAAI Fellow in 1999, deemed ACM Fellow in 2005, and selected to be an AAAS Fellow in 2020. Dan was a founding editor for the Journal of AI Research, was area editor for the Journal of the ACM, guest editor for Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, and was Program Chair for AAAI-96. Dan has published two books and scads of technical papers.
Dan is an active entrepreneur with several patents and technology licenses. He co-founded Netbot Incorporated, creator of Jango Shopping Search (acquired by Excite), AdRelevance, a monitoring service for internet advertising (acquired by Nielsen NetRatings), and data integration company Nimble Technology (acquired by Actuate). Dan is a Venture Partner at the Madrona Venture Group and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Madrona and AI2.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Chairman in Computer Science
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- Predoctoral Young Investigator
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- Technical Fellow and Chief Scientific Officer
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- Temporal Informatics of the WWW, Associate Professor, University of Michigan ( Ann Arbor, MIT ) .
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- Electronic Encyclopedia Senior Software Architect
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- Chief Development Officer
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- Hope Cochran Managing Director
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- Technical Advisor to the Chairman
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- Hope Cochran Managing Director
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- Professor at University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, BCS Karen Sparck Jones Award 2009, SIGDAT President 2018
Job Titles:
- Research
- Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI
Niket Tandon is a Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, specializing in research related to commonsense reasoning and feedback-guided reasoning. He works at the Aristo team responsible for creating AI which aced science exams. In 2016, Tandon obtained his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany, where he was supervised by Professor Gerhard Weikum. His thesis resulted in the largest automatically extracted commonsense knowledge base at the time, called WebChild, which has since been applied in NLP applications and Visual Question Answering. Niket has held various positions in the past, including at Microsoft Research, Redmond; Yahoo R&D, Bangalore; and IBM Labs. He is also the founder of PQRS research, an organization providing research opportunities to undergraduate students from underrepresented institutes. He has organized tutorials and workshops at various conferences, and has been actively engaging with the research community in reviewing roles as Senior PC, Area Chair and in Panel discussions, all with a focus on NLP and commonsense knowledge.
Job Titles:
- Research Scientist at AI2
Oyvind Tafjord is a Research Scientist at AI2. Prior to AI2 he was the Chief Architect of Wolfram|Alpha, playing an integral role in building up that system, from parsing algorithms and knowledge representation to overall systems architecture. He received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton in 1999 and a master's degree from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1994.
With lifetime giving totaling over $2 billion, investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen spent his career tackling some of the world's biggest challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Through both for-profit and philanthropic investments, Paul Allen sparked important developments and innovations in the areas of science, technology, education, conservation, the arts and community improvement.
Allen, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, mapped new frontiers and fueled exploration across a broad range of areas as the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc., the Seattle-based company that oversees his business and philanthropic efforts. Allen's vision forwarded projects such as the massive redevelopment of Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, the foundation of three museums including Seattle's MoPOP, and the launching of ambitious engineering project Stratolaunch Systems. He also owned the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association.
Allen is included among the world's leading philanthropists who have pledged to give the majority of their fortunes to charity and to philanthropic ventures. During his lifetime, he founded several non-profit scientific institutes to accelerate important areas of human health and technology. In 2003, he founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science to accelerate understanding of the human brain in health and disease. A decade later, he launched the Allen Institute for AI to explore critical questions in artificial intelligence. In 2014, he founded the Allen Institute for Cell Science which uses diverse technologies and approaches at a large scale to study the cell and its components as an integrated system. In 2016, he introduced The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group to identify and foster new ideas in bioscience around the world, and in 2018 he founded the Allen Institute for Immunology to improve how we diagnose, treat and prevent immune-related diseases.
Allen's award-winning film company, Vulcan Productions, developed and supported media projects that help audiences understand the world around them and respond to challenges. Idea Man, Allen's 2011 memoir, was a New York Times bestseller.
Paul G. Allen launched the Allen Institute for AI in 2014 to explore critical questions in the field of AI. His philanthropy allows us to push the boundaries of fundamental AI research and to find high-impact ways to deploy these new technologies for the benefit of humanity.
Job Titles:
- Research
- Senior Research Manager for the Aristo
Peter Clark is the Senior Research Manager for the Aristo team. His work focuses upon natural language processing, machine reasoning, and large knowledge bases, and the interplay between these three areas. He has received several awards including a AAAI Best Paper (1997), Boeing Associate Technical Fellowship (2004), and AAAI Senior Member (2014). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991, and has researched these topics for 30 years with more than 80 refereed publications.
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- Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research & Incubations
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- Chief Operating Officer, AI2 Israel
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- Chief Operating & Strategy Officer
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- Partner, Cercano Management
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- Fredkin University Professor at Carnegie Mellon, Fellow of AAAI and AAAS, AAAI Distinguished Service Award 2007
Job Titles:
- Research Scientist at AI2
Tushar Khot is a Research Scientist at AI2, specializing in probabilistic graphical models for structured data. His research focuses on modeling structured data using first-order logic and probabilistic models. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014 and his B.Tech from NIT Trichy in 2006. Prior to his PhD, he worked at Google Bangalore for two years.
Job Titles:
- Research Director, AI2 Israel