Michael Witbrock

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Michael Witbrock  | Professor at Waipapa Taumata Rau

(The University of Auckland; AI Forum Executive Council; Strong AI Lab; AI4Good Foundation)

I am currently interested in research collaboration, in offering consulting on AI strategy, and in mentoring start-ups, but not in offers of employment. Michael Witbrock received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently a professor in the School of Computer Science at The University of Auckland leading NAOInstitite for Natural, Artificial and Organisational Intelligence) and its component Strong AI Lab (SAIL), a member of the Centre for Brain Research (CBR), and Scientific Director of Precision Driven Health. Previously he was a manager and distinguished research staff member at IBM T J Watson Research center, leading work at the intersection of learning and reasoning and advising on AI strategy up to C-suite level.

Previously to that, he founded and acted as CEO at Curious Cat Company, building assistants that actually understand you and what you do, and was Vice President for Research at Cycorp, and CEO at Cycorp Europe, where he lead research in automated knowledge acquisition from text and dialogue, automated reasoning, and intelligent human-computer interaction. Previously to that he was Principal Scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge based approaches to understanding web user behavior, a research scientist at Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center, working on statistical text summarization, and a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon on the Informedia spoken and video document information retrieval project. His dissertation work at CMU was in the area of machine learning for speaker modelling. He is author of numerous publications in areas ranging across neural networks, parallel computer architecture, multimedia information retrieval, web browser design, genetic design, computational linguistics and speech recognition and is a inventor on six US patents.

Specialties: AI strategy, AI Entrepreneurship; Research management, Machine learning, Reasoning and automated inference, Parallel computer architecture, Intelligent information retrieval, Computational linguistics and collaborative systems, and Speech recognition.