Catherine Havasi


Catherine Havasi is an American scientist who specialises in artificial intelligence at MIT Media Lab. She is co-founder and CEO of AI company Luminoso. Havasi was a member of the MIT group engaged in the Open Mind Common Sense AI project and that created the natural language AI program ConceptNet.

Early life and education

Havasi grew up in Pittsburgh and became interested in artificial intelligence from reading Marvin Minsky's 1986 book The Society of Mind. She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she became involved in the MIT Media Lab and studied under Minsky. She received a Ph.D in computer science from Brandeis University.

Career

In 1999, she became involved in the MIT project Open Mind Common Sense with Minsky and Push Singh, and was part of a team that created ConceptNet, an open-source semantic network based on the information in the OMCS database.
In 2010, Havasi was among the team that founded Luminoso, a text analytics software company building on the work of ConceptNet.
Havasi was named among Boston Business Journal's "40 Under 40", of business and civic leaders making a major impact in their respective fields in 2014. Fast Company included her in its "100 Most Creative People in Business 2015" listing.
She is co-author of 7 peer-reviewed journal articles on AI and language, and many per-reviewed major conference presentations,

Selected publications

Most cited publication