Catherine Havasi facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Catherine Havasi
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| Born | 1981 (age 43–44) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (S.B., 2003) (M.Eng, 2004) Brandeis University (Ph.D, 2009) |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Artificial intelligence |
| Thesis | Discovering Semantic Relations Using Singular Value Decomposition (2009) |
| Doctoral advisor | James Pustejovsky |
Catherine Havasi (born in 1981) is an American scientist who works with artificial intelligence (AI). She is known for her work at the MIT Media Lab. She also helped start and was the CEO of an AI company called Luminoso for eight years.
Catherine Havasi was part of the MIT team that created ConceptNet. This is a special AI program that understands natural language, which is how humans speak and write. Currently, she is the Chief of Innovation and Technology Strategy at Babel Street, a company that uses AI to turn data into useful information.
Early Life and Education
Catherine Havasi grew up in Pittsburgh, a city in Pennsylvania. She became interested in artificial intelligence after reading a book called The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. Minsky was a famous AI scientist.
She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, she joined the MIT Media Lab and studied with Marvin Minsky himself. She also participated in science fairs like the Science Talent Search and the International Science and Engineering Fair. Catherine earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT. Later, she received her PhD in computer science from Brandeis University.
Career in Artificial Intelligence
In the 1990s, Catherine Havasi helped invent a way to use "crowd sourcing" for artificial intelligence. This means getting many people to help collect information for AI systems.
In 1999, she joined the MIT project called Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS). Working with Minsky and Push Singh, she was part of the team that created ConceptNet. ConceptNet is like a huge network of common sense knowledge. It helps computers understand things the way people do, based on information gathered from the OMCS project.
In 2010, Havasi was part of the team that started Luminoso. This company develops software that analyzes text, building on the ideas from ConceptNet.
Catherine Havasi has been recognized for her important work. In 2014, Boston Business Journal named her one of their "40 Under 40" leaders. In 2015, Fast Company included her in their list of "100 Most Creative People in Business."
In 2019, the U.S. Embassy invited Dr. Havasi to Portugal. She gave talks on "Practical Natural Language Processing." This was because of her work at MIT, where she helped advance fields like how AI learns and understands language.
She has also written many articles about AI and language for scientific journals and conferences.
