User:Ashleytway/sandbox

Kris Hammond
Born	Kristian Hammond
Education	BA (Philosophy) M.S. (Computer Science) Doctorate (Computer Science)
Alma mater	Yale University
Occupation(s)	Academia, researcher
Employer	Narrative Science

"Kristian “Kris” Hammond" is an American computer scientist, Artificial Intelligence researcher and business executive. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of Narrative Science. He is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. He is also a director of the Medill/McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism at Northwestern University.

Education

Hammond graduated from Yale University in 1979, receiving a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. He then went on to earn a Master’s degree and PhD in Computer Science from Yale University in 1982 and 1986, respectively. His discertation, Case-Based Planning: Viewing Planning As a Memory Task, was focused on the automatic generation and learning of plans of action based on a process model of memory rather than rules.

Academia

In 1986, after completing his education at Yale, Hammond joined the faculty at The University of Chicago where he served as a professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Psychology and founded the school’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Under his leadership and with funding from NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, the Whitaker Foundation, Apple Computer, McKinsey and Microsoft Research, the laboratory thrived for over a decade as a center for innovative artificial intelligence research.

In 1998, Hammond moved to Northwestern University, where he formed the Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab). At the InfoLab, his team focuses on creating technology that bridges the gap between people and information.

During his time at Northwestern, Kris Hammond was a faculty advisor for a Northwestern research project called StatsMonkey, a software prototype that automatically generated baseball game recaps.

Research

Hammond’s research focus is on the fundamental issues of Artificial Intelligence and the use of intelligent systems in improving human/computer interaction. One of the primary foci of this work has been in the area of the automatic generation of compelling content and experiences based on the narrative structure and audience needs. This work is currently embodied in the concept of Narrative Analytics.

Professional life

In 2010, Kris Hammond co-founded Narrative Science, an artificial intelligence company that automatically generates stories and reporting from structured data, with Larry Birnbaum and Stuart Frankel based on the StatsMonkey prototype. He serves as Chief Scientist for the company. Before Narrative Science, Hammond spent a year as the weekly technology correspondent for WTTW's Chicago Tomorrow from 2000 to 2001. He also served as a consultant at AllVoices, Inc. from 2006 to 2007.

Over the years, four companies have been based on Hammond’s technologies: Verb, Media River, AllVoices and Narrative Science.

Kris currently sits on a United Nations policy committee run by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

Scholarly works

Hammond is an accomplished researcher in the areas of human-machine interaction, context-driven information systems, and artificial intelligence with work published in several academic journals. A selection of his scholarly works and articles, are the following;

• Hammond, Kristian; McNally, Patrick (2011). "Picasso, Pato and Perro: Reconciling Procedure with Creativity" (PDF). Retrieved 15 August 2014. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Hammond, Kristian; Gandy, Lisa (5 July 2011). "Creating Conversations: An Automated Dialog System". AAAI Publications: 482–485. Retrieved 15 August 2014.
• Hammond, Kristian; Iacobelli, Francisco; Larry, Birnbaum (April 2010). "Synergy Between Automatic Content Generation and Social Media" (PDF). Third Workshop on Mashups, Enterprise Mashups and Lightweight Composition on the Web. Retrieved 15 August 2014.
• Hammond, Kristian; Templon, John; McNally, Patrick; Birnbaum, Larry; Allen, Nicholas (03 November 2010). "StatsMonkey: A Data-Driven Sports Narrative Writer". AAAI Publications. Retrieved 15 August 2014. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Hammond, Kristian; Birnbaum, Larry; Francisco, Iacobelli (February 2010). Tell Me More, not just "More of the Same" (PDF). pp. 81–90. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.182.3400. doi:10.1145/1719970.1719982. ISBN 9781605585154. Retrieved 15 August 2014. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
• Hammond, Kristian; Gandy, Lisa; Nichols, Nathan (30 April 2010). Shout Out: Integrating News and Reader Comments (PDF). pp. 1095–1096. doi:10.1145/1772690.1772821. ISBN 9781605587998. Retrieved 15 August 2014. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
• Hammond, Kristian; Birnbaum, Larry; Nichols, Nathan; Francisco, Iacobelli (2009). Finding New Information via Robust Entity Detection (PDF). Studies in Computational Intelligence. Vol. 396. pp. 375–387. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-25691-2_16. ISBN 978-3-642-25690-5. Retrieved 15 August 2014. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
• Hammond, Kristian; Gandy, Lisa; Nichols, Nathan (2009). "From Generating to Mining: Automatically Scripting Conversations Using Existing Online Sources" (PDF). Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Retrieved 15 August 2014.

Further Reading

• Levy, Steven. "Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?". Wired. Wired Magazine.
• Bemis, Tom. "Start-up turns data into plain English". Market Watch. The Wall Street Journal.
• Lohr, Steve. "In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column". New York Times. New York Times.

External LInks

• Technori Pitch
• September 2013 NY Enterprise Technology Meetup
• FinovateFall 2013
• Turning Numbers Into Narrative for an Audience of One