The U.S. Embassy invited Dr. Catherine Havasi to Portugal for a series of lectures on “Practical Natural Language Processing.” Dr. Havasi, a technology strategist, AI researcher, and entrepreneur, currently serves as a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab.
Her work at MIT has spanned the fields of computational creativity, transfer and meta learning, natural language understanding, and educational outreach, resulting in several spinout companies: Dalang, Luminoso, and Learning Unlimited. In the late 90s, she was a crowdsourcing pioneer when she co-founded the Open Mind Common Sense Project, the first crowd-sourced project for artificial intelligence, whose data led to the creation of ConceptNet, an open source and multilingual knowledge graph for language understanding. She previously directed the Digital Intuition group at the MIT Media Lab under a prior appointment. She also runs the AI strategy consulting firm Snowcap AI helping companies go to market and come up with innovation strategy around artificial intelligence.
During the week-long program, Dr. Havasi engaged with high school students, university students, professors, and researchers in Lisbon, Almada, Minho, Porto, and Ponta Delgada. She also engaged with government officials and business leaders to promote greater awareness and cooperation between Portugal and the United States in the area of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. This visit was an opportunity to promote mutual prosperity by encouraging relations between entities in the United States and Portugal in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
