Vinay Chaudhri
Vinay is the program director within the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International (founded as Stanford Research Institute), one of the largest private research facilities in the USA. He joined SRI in 1995 and he has been responsible for creating and leading a group of research scientists and research engineers with skills ranging from reasoning and ontologies to human computer interaction and natural language processing. Vinay's technical expertise ranges from creating innovative products that can leverage advanced AI techniques from knowledge representation and reasoning, acquisition of knowledge from domain experts and natural language text, natural language question answering and machine learning. Some example products include online learning/training environments, question answering, intelligent semantic search and dialog-based intelligent assistant applications. He had a key
role in the following projects: Inquire, an intelligent textbook that answers students’ questions, engages their interest and improves their understanding, contracted by Vulcan Inc., the company of Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen, whose mission is to find smart solutions for some of the world’s biggest challenges.
Ontology Concepts, Uses, and Evaluation contracted by Toyota. AURA (Automated User-Centered Reasoning and Acquisition System), a system that uses artificial intelligence to answer questions and solve problems in a range of scientific disciplines, contracted by Vulcan Inc. Project Halo, a staged research effort by Vulcan Inc. towards the development of a Digital Aristotle, an application capable of producing user and domain-appropriate answers and justifications to novel (previously unseen) questions in an ever-growing number of domains. CALO Query Manager (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) who’s goal was to provide an ontology that could bridge among different components of an intelligent assistant and provide a query answering service that integrates those components, contracted by DARPA. SHAKEN: A Knowledge Entry System for Domain Experts, contracted by DARPA. HPKB (High-Performance Knowledge Bases) whose goal was to enable knowledge engineers to construct knowledge bases (KBs) faster, contracted by DARPA. Reusable Tools for Knowledge Base and Ontology Development, a generic knowledge base browsing and editing system contracted by the US Air Force Research Labs.
In 2010 and 2011 he was a Visiting Lecturer of Computer Science at Stanford University. He’s currently a member of the editorial board for the AI Magazine, a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Applied Ontology, and co-chair for the industry track for the International Semantic Web Conference. He is a Program Committee Member of the Cognitive Systems Conference, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Annual Conference - AAAI, European Semantic Web Conference. He’s a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association of Computing Machinery and Special Interest group on Artificial Intelligence, the International Association of Ontology and its Application, the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society, and the Association of Computational Linguistics.
Vinay was awarded the Best Demo Award at the 19th European Conference on Knowledge Engineering in 2014, the Best Video Award at the AAAI Video Competition in 2012, the University of Toronto Open Fellowship, the University of Toronto Connaught Fellowship, and in 2014 he was elected Senior Member of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence).
He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and started his career in 1988 as an Analyst Programmer at Tata Consultancy Services.