| Intro | American computer scientist |
| Is |
Scientist Computer scientist |
| From | United States of America |
| Type |
Technology Science |
| Gender | female |
Catherine Havasi (born 1981 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American scientist who specialises in artificial intelligence (AI) at MIT Media Lab. She is co-founder and CEO of AI company Luminoso. Havasi co-created MIT’s Open Mind Common Sense (also known as OMCS) AI project and led the MIT team that created the natural language AI programme ConceptNet. Fast Company included her in its “100 Most Creative People in Business 2015” listing.
Early life and education
Catherine Havasi grew up in Pittsburgh and became interested in artificial intelligence and how the brain works from an early age after reading Marvin Minsky’s 1986 book The Society of Mind. Havasi attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied under Minsky. She became involved in the MIT Media Lab while still an undergraduate. She received a Ph.D in computer science from Brandeis University.
Career
In 1999, Havasi became involved in Open Mind Common Sense as cofounder with Marvin Minsky and Push Singh, also serving as its director. Havasi then led a team at MIT Media Lab to create ConceptNet, an open-source semantic network based on the information in the OMCS database.
In 2010, Havasi was among the team that founded Luminoso, a text analytics software company to build on the work of ConceptNet. The company has raised $8 million in financing. Luminoso clients include Sony, REI, Intel, Autodesk and Scotts.
Havasi was named among Boston Business Journal’s “40 Under 40”, of business and civic leaders making a major impact in their respective fields in 2014.
She is co-author of more than 40 peer-reviewed publications on AI and language.
Partial bibliography
- Catherine Havasi, Robert Speer, James Pustejovsky, and Henry Lieberman. Digital Intuition: Applying Common Sense Using Dimensionality Reduction. IEEE Journal of Intelligent Systems, July 2009.
- Robert Speer, Catherine Havasi, and Henry Lieberman. AnalogySpace: Reducing the dimensionality of common sense knowledge. Proceedings of AAAI 2008, July 2008.
- Catherine Havasi, Robert Speer, and Jason Alonso. ConceptNet 3: a flexible, multi-lingual semantic network for common sense knowledge. In Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Borovets, Bulgaria, September 2007.