Humanizing the Machine with Language:
                Building the Bridge between Data and Information
                                                  Kristian Hammond
                                                Northwestern University
                                            McCormick School of Engineering
                                                   2233 Tech Drive
                                                  Mudd Room 3109
                                                  Evanston, IL 60208
                                                        USA
                                            Kristian.Hammond@northwestern.edu




ABSTRACT
It is clear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is               Kristian J. Hammond is the Bill and Cathy
transforming the world in ways that no other set of            Osborn Professor of Computer Science at
technologies ever have. Technologies of machine                Northwestern University and the co-founder of
learning, text analysis, recommendation, and natural           the Artificial Intelligence company Narrative
language processing are all being applied to a wide            Science. He has spent most of his career focused
variety of problems and yet most of us still struggle to       on the problem of making machines smarter.
understand what their results mean or even the                 Since the fall of 2016, he has been the faculty
numbers behind them. The numbers alone simply do               lead of Northwestern’s CS + X initiative,
not provide us with what we really need: information           exploring how computational thinking can be
and insight. The data and the algorithms are only the          used to transform fields such as the law,
first step in finding the insights we want and making
                                                               medicine, and education. Most recently, he has
them useful to the decision makers who need them.
                                                               taken on the role of directing Northwestern’s
In this talk, I will present a set of approaches to            Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence.
connecting humans with the intelligent systems that            Kris’s primary research is at the intersection of
serve them using the tool that is most natural to us,          data analytics and human/machine
language. We will look at how Intelligent Narrative
                                                               communication. He works on computational
Generation can play the crucial role of bridging the
gap between the world of numbers and symbols and
                                                               methods for interpreting user needs, translating
our need for understandable insights. We will dive             those needs into machine executable queries and
into examples from business, education and Law to              analysis, and then mapping the results into
show how the power of language can provide us all              natural language. His vision is to automate the
with the insights that are still trapped in the wealth of      relationship between business goals and data
data we now control.                                           science in an effort to scale the link between the
In: Proceedings of the Second International                    data that serves us and the language we need to
Workshop on AI and Intelligent Assistance for Legal            understand it. Kris believes in humanizing
Professionals in the Digital Workplace (LegalAIIA              computers with the aim of stopping the process of
2021), held in conjunction with ICAIL 2021. June               mechanizing people.
21, 2021. Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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