2006-10-18

Dr. Kristian Hammond, Professor of Computer Science
Northwestern University

Kris will present “Getting to Your Heart’s Desire: Stories from the InfoLab.”  At the InfoLab, students and faculty work closely creating technology that bridges the gap between people and the information they need. The InfoLab has focused on frictionless information systems that make use of a wide variety of user contexts to support and radically transform user experiences in the areas of information retrieval, media delivery, speech recognition, collaborative environments, news gathering, intelligent browsing and personalized recommendation.
The problem with the computer is that it only does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. But few of us can actually describe what we want at the level of detail required to communicate with the machine. As a result, our interactions with the machine seem like conversations with an idiot savant. So, while the primary role of the machine in our lives is communication, there exists a huge gap between our wants and the machine’s ability to understand.
Bridging this gap is the mission of the InfoLab.
Building systems that track the context of a user’s activities, both on line and off, and then use that context to figure out and retrieve what they need, the InfoLab is dedicated to creating a man/machine dynamic in which the machine itself vanishes and is replaced by a helper and trusted aide.
In this talk, he will outline the problems people have with getting to information and describe some of the InfoLab systems that help them. We’ll look at a range of systems that capture user contexts as people edit and browse online, check books out of the library, and even watch TV. We’ll then look at how these systems use this information to provide relevant services to people no matter where they are, what they’re doing or what they are thinking

Speaker Biography
Dr. Kristian Hammond is a professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University and an accomplished researcher in the areas of human-machine interaction, context-driven information systems and artificial intelligence.  After completing his Ph.D. in computer science at Yale University in 1986 and crafting the DARPA white paper that helped define and fund the field of Case-Based Reasoning, Kristian Hammond founded The University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Under his direction, the laboratory flourished as a center for innovative artificial intelligence research for more than a decade, funded by NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, the Whitaker Foundation, Apple Computer, McKinsey and Microsoft Research. 
While at the University of Chicago, Dr. Hammond began to shape a vision of frictionless information systems, systems that make use of the context of a user’s activities and thought to better serve them. 
In 1998, Professor Hammond and his students moved to Northwestern University’s Computer Science Department to form the Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab). At the InfoLab, students and faculty work closely creating technology that bridges the gap between people and the information they need.  The InfoLab has focused on frictionless information systems that make use of a wide variety of user contexts to support and radically transform user experiences in the areas of information retrieval, media delivery, speech recognition, collaborative environments, news gathering, intelligent browsing and personalized recommendation.  While many of his technologies have been previously deployed, including one currently on display at Chicago’s Second City, Watson is the first of the InfoLab systems to be fully commercialized.
Dr. Hammond has been an invited speaker at wide range of venues including the Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, the Joint International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Carnegie Mellon, MIT’s Media Lab, Ford Motor Company, Boeing, McKinsey and Microsoft Research.  He has been a consultant on frictionless information systems for Ford Motor Company, Accenture, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and McKinsey. 
Articles on Dr. Hammond’s work have appeared in the New York Times, the International Daily Herald, Chicago Sun Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, WTTW, and Wired Magazine.  Throughout his career, he has served as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation as well as all of the major AI and Cognitive Science conferences and journals and has chaired both the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces and the Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.  Dr. Hammond currently serves on Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s Council of Technology Advisors.