Posts

Computational Drug Discovery: An Interview with Dr. Anne Carpenter

Tara Chklovski: What problem are you working on? Anne Carpenter: My group is developing software to accelerate drug discovery. Normally a researcher works on a single disease, devoting her entire life to studying it. We are working on a general software tool for image analysis. You may wonder why we need image analysis to cure […]

Intelligent Music: Emilia Gómez on Big Data and Making Music More Accessible

In our ongoing AI in Your Community series, I spoke with Emilia Gómez, a researcher on music information retrieval—an interdisciplinary area dealing with music and artificial intelligence. She works at the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. Tara Chklovski: What problem are you currently working on? Emilia Gómez: My research deals with […]

Matching Real Solutions to Real Needs — Dr. Carolyn Rosé on Conversation-Improving AI and Collaborative Learning

Tara Chklovski: What is your current work? Carolyn Rosé: I work in the area of education, trying to apply artificial intelligence techniques to support students’ learning. In particular, I’m trying to identify characteristics of people that would make them work well together and then connecting them. So we very much are not trying to replace […]

Learning how Natural Language Processing is helping us understand ourselves better: An Interview with Rada Mihalcea

Tara Chklovski: What problem are you trying to solve? Rada Mihalcea: I work in Artificial Intelligence, and then within that, Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is about building computer programs that deal with language. A traditional NLP example (that I am not working on), is machine translation — through which text in one language, say […]

The essence of happiness — Dr. Qiang Yang on teaching computers and humans

Tara Chklovski: What research areas are you working on? Qiang Yang: I’m working on developing algorithms for machine learning. Machine learning is where you train a computer to do things that you do and are an expert at. The way we teach computers is by first generating lots of examples — this is known as […]

Working Together on Technology for Good: AI Learning Advice from Dr. Marie desJardins

As part of our ongoing AI In your Community series, I sat down with Dr. Marie desJardins, Associate Dean and Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland Baltimore County, to learn about her artificial intelligence research and curriculum development. Marie was chosen to be one of the eight fellows at AAAI-18: the Thirty-Second AAAI […]

“A combination of curiosity and confidence”: A conversation with John Maloney

It sounded to me much like Etoys. Mitch planned to get Scratch out to large numbers of kids, initially  through the Computer Clubhouse network and then through an online website to as many people as possible. As he talked, I thought: “Oh, oh, oh! I can build that, I can build that!” Alan’s team had […]

Assistive Technologies and finding the right problems to solve: a conversation on AI with Maja Matarić

Tara Chklovski: What inspires you? Maja Matarić: I don’t think I always knew what inspired me, but have now finally realized that what really motivates and drives me is helping the underdog. I realized I am just a person who really wants to feel like they’re helping someone – and that’s how I came to discover assistive […]