Reflections on a Career of Building Understanding With AI

Chris Hazard is co-founder and CTO of Howso. Howso’s understandable and privacy enhancing AI spun out of Hazardous Software, a company Chris founded in 2007 that focuses on decision support, visualization, and simulation for hard strategy problems in large organizations, DoD, and government. Chris holds a PhD in computer science from NC State, with focus on artificial intelligence for trust and reputation. He was a software architect of CDMA infrastructure at Motorola, worked on robot coordination and logistics at Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), and advised NATO on cyber security policies. He has led simulation, serious gaming, and software projects related to cyber security, social engineering, logistics, economics, and psychology, and is a certified hypnotist. Dr. Hazard is also known for his 2011 game Achron, which won GameSpot’s Best Original Game Mechanic award, and for his research on AI/ML, privacy, game design, and human-computer interaction, for which he has given keynote speeches at major conferences and been featured in mainstream media.

Building and Evaluating AI-Powered Apps: Challenges, Lessons, and Future Research Directions

Dr. Chris Parnin’s research spans developer productivity, cognition and learning, and automated infrastructure. He has published over 90 papers, received five SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, a 10-Year Impact Paper Award, a Google Faculty Award, and an NSF CAREER Award. His work has been featured in hundreds of international news articles and frequently discussed in industry forums. Currently, Dr. Parnin leads research efforts at Microsoft focused on building and evaluating Copilots for Visual Studio and the Office Suite. His experience includes serving as a tenured professor at NC State University, contributing to Microsoft Research’s Human Interactions in Programming group, conducting field studies with ABB Research, and over a decade of professional programming in the defense industry. He has collaborated with industry partners to bridge research and practice, including developing mentorship programs for Stack Overflow, creating anxiety-reducing features for CoderPad, and advancing equitable hiring solutions with Byteboard. He also co-organized five Continuous Deployment Summits hosted by Facebook, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, fostering collaboration and innovation in deployment practices.

Factoring in the Human to Make AI Natural

Mona Singh earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. Beginning in graduate school, Mona has worked in a variety of companies, in sectors such as telecommunications, healthcare, and e-commerce, from both research and product perspectives. She worked on technologies and research involving natural language interfaces for databases, spoken dialogue systems, touchscreens, smart phones, location-based services, data analytics, e-commerce, and augmented reality.

Throughout her career, Mona has focused on understanding the needs of the users. She championed user-centered design. She has applied evidence-based analysis in an agile methodology for prioritizing effort.

Mona is an inventor of over 130 US awarded patents. Some of her patents have proved central in subsequent advances. One of her former employers, Ericsson, received major payoffs from litigation against Apple and Samsung for infringement of one of Mona’s patents. In recent years, Mona has been called upon as an expert witness in patent litigation in e-commerce and telecommunications.

AI and designing for analytics

Rajiv leads Product Design at SAS. He has over 20 years of experience in design, design management, and designing for analytics. He leads an expert team of user experience designers, visual designers, and user researchers who collaborate with product teams to design compelling, approachable, and easy-to-use analytic products. The Product Design team manages the corporate design system and user interface standards and guidelines that form the basis of the unified user experience connecting all SAS products.

Augmenting Intelligent Humans

Josef Spjut is a senior research scientist at NVIDIA, focusing on research across the use of generative artificial intelligence for video games, human performance in esports, virtual and augmented reality, and hardware ray-tracing. Spjut is also an adjunct associate professor at Duke University in the engineering department. Previously, he was a visiting assistant professor at Harvey Mudd College.

Spjut received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah and a bachelor’s degree from University of California, Riverside, both in computer engineering.