I am a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University and co-founder of the startup Narrative Science where I am Chief Scientist. At Narrative Science, we are commercializing a technology called Quill that is able to examine data, extract meaning from them and then transform that meaning in to language. I’m short, it is able to transform the numbers that most people cannot understand into explanations and stories that they can.

My drivers are human-machine interaction; AI enabled narrative generation and a personal mission to build a bridge of explanation between the world of technology and the people who use it.

In 1986, I founded the University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1998, I moved my lab and students to Northwestern University in order to found Northwestern’s Intelligent Information Laboratory where I have been focused on technologies that use small bits of intelligence to humanize our interaction with the machine.

Before Narrative Science, I worked to build, fund, and sell three start-ups based on my technologies. And, for reasons I still cannot quite understand, I also spent two years as a technology correspondent for WTTW’s Chicago Tomorrow.

In 2012, I went on leave from Northwestern to take on the full time role of Chief Scientist at Narrative Science.

Most recently, I was part of the United Nations working group tasked with shaping the international policy landscape regarding the control and regulation of the lethal autonomous devices. And in September 2015, I was named the Illinois Technology Association’s Technologist of the Year.

One of my proudest moments was when my research was mocked as frivolous on the floor of the US Senate at exactly the same time that the results that flowed from it were driving the formation of Narrative Science.

I got my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale where I worked on automatic generation of plans of action based on a model of reasoning as remembering.