Board of Scientific Advisors
Kristian Hammond, PhD, Founder and Scientific Advisor
Dr. Kristian Hammond, co-inventor of Intellext's core product, Watson, is an accomplished visionary and renowned speaker 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, Dr. 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.
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. Using one of the first technologies rising out of this work, Hammond started Recommender, Inc., and continued to work closely with the company until eventually selling to Attenza, Inc. in 2001.
In 1998, Dr. Hammond moved to Northwestern University's Computer Science Department to form the Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab). At the InfoLab, students and faculty work closely on creating technology that bridges the gap between people and the information they need. In 2001, he founded Northwestern University's DevLab, an incubator program whose mission is to turn research prototypes, such as Watson, into complete and robust products. 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.
A past chair of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces and the Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 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 articles on Dr. Hammond's work have appeared in The New York Times, The International Daily Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.
Dr. Hammond currently directs Northwestern's InfoLab and DevLab, serves on Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's Council of Technology Advisors, and is the lead scientific advisor to Intellext.
Larry Birnbaum, PhD, Scientific Advisor
Dr. Larry Birnbaum, co-founder and Scientific Advisor, is an expert in intelligent information systems, human-computer interaction, and natural language processing by computer. Dr. Birnbaum received his Ph.D. in computer science at Yale University in 1986, and served on the faculty there until moving to Northwestern University as a founding member of the Institute for the Learning Sciences in 1989. He served as Chair of the Computer Science Department at Northwestern from 1998-2002. He is currently co-director of Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab) and director of IP management for its Information Processing Development Laboratory (DevLab).
Dr. Birnbaum's technical vision embraces systems that are contextually "savvy" and semantically competent-systems like Intellext's Watson. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 technical papers, as an inventor has 7 patents pending, and has served on the program committee for numerous academic conferences, including the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, as well as review panels for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Birnbaum has been sought after to consult for such companies as Accenture, DiamondCluster, GM, and SBC, as well as Chicago-area start-ups Cognitive Arts and FirstLook. He currently serves on the scientific advisory board for InfoAlly, a Michigan-based start-up specializing in online educational software products. Dr. Birnbaum has been a speaker at numerous academic and business venues, including the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, MIT, Boeing, General Motors, and Motorola.
