Michael J Witbrock (Lucid.AI)

Michael Witbrock is a professor of computer science at The University of Auckland (UoA) in New Zealand, building a research group, the Broad AI Lab, at the intersection of machine learning, reasoning and natural language understanding, with an additional focus on maximizing the near-term benefit of AI to NZ entrepreneurs and business, and more generally achieving the best social and civilizational impacts of increasingly powerful AI. Prof. Witbrock is the author of numerous publications in areas ranging across computational linguistics, speech modelling and recognition, neural networks, automated inference, automated reading and multimedia information retrieval, and has dabbled in web browser design and implementation, genetic design and parallel computer architecture. As well as his technical work, he is very interested in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship around AI and for social good, and in the social and economic outcomes of advances in AI. He has been pursuing the former interest by founding small companies (nz.com, curiouscat.cc) and making angel investments, and until recently as a member of the board of StartOut. His broader interest in AI and society has been pursued, inter alia, as a co-founder and chair of AI4Good.org