Research Scientist
MIT Media Lab
Dr. Catherine Havasi is a research scientist in computational linguistics and machine learning at the MIT Media Lab where she runs the Digital Intuition group. She co-founded the Open Mind Common Sense project, which uses crowdsourced information about the world to understand natural language text and make computers easier to use. She currently manages the Common Sense Computing Initiative, a research project to collect common sense in six languages, with ties to companies and research groups around the world. With students, she re-created the lexical resource ConceptNet which is used in hundreds of research projects every year. She received her PhD from Brandeis University in 2009 for research in machine learning and natural language processing, and a masters from MIT in 2004 for cognitive modeling in developmental psychology. She is the co-founder of the text understanding company Luminoso and is on the co-founder and board member of the education nonproft Learning Unlimited. She has served as the organizer of the CSIUI series of workshops at the IUI conference, the AAAI Common Sense Knowledge Symposium, and guest editor for the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.