Kristian Hammond

Kristian Hammond, Phd serves as the Chief Technology Officer of Narrative Science Inc. Dr. Hammond serves as Scientific Advisor of Media River Inc. (formerly, Intellext Inc.) and co-founded in 2003. He is a Co-Founder of Verb and serves as its Chief Scientist. He served as Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Chicago and its founder. Under his direction, the laboratory flourished as a center for innovative artificial intelligence research for more than a decade. While at the University of Chicago, Dr. Hammond began to shape a vision of frictionless information systems. He is also a professor of Computer Science and Journalism at Northwestern University. Dr. Hammond started Recommender, Inc., and continued to work closely with the company until eventually selling to Attenza, Inc. in 2001. In 1998, Dr. Hammond moved to Northwestern University’s Computer Science Department to form the Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab).

In 2001, he founded Northwestern University’s DevLab, an incubator program whose mission is to turn research prototypes, such as Watson, into complete and robust products. While many of his technologies have been previously deployed, including on display at Chicago’s Second City, Watson is the first of the InfoLab systems to be fully commercialized. He consulted for such companies as Anderson Consulting, McKinsey, Boeing Aerospace, and Lockheed. A past chair of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces and the Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Dr. Hammond has been an invited speaker at wide range of venues including the Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, the Joint International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Carnegie Mellon, MIT’s Media Lab, Ford Motor

Company, Boeing, McKinsey and Microsoft. Research articles on Dr. Hammond’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The International Daily Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. Dr. Hammond directs Northwestern’s InfoLab and DevLab, serves on Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s Council of Technology Advisors. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1986.