30 Facts About Eric Horvitz

Eric Joel Horvitz is an American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer.

Eric Horvitz was previously the director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, New York, NY, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bangalore, India.

Eric Horvitz did his doctoral work under advisors Ronald A Howard, George B Dantzig, Edward H Shortliffe, and Patrick Suppes.

Eric Horvitz is currently the Chief Scientific Officer of Microsoft.

Eric Horvitz has been elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Eric Horvitz was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.

Eric Horvitz serves on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the US National Academies.

Eric Horvitz's contributions include advances in principles and applications of machine learning and inference, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, bioinformatics, and e-commerce.

Eric Horvitz played a significant role in the use of probability and decision theory in artificial intelligence.

Eric Horvitz's work raised the credibility of artificial intelligence in other areas of computer science and computer engineering, influencing fields ranging from human-computer interaction to operating systems.

Eric Horvitz's research helped establish the link between artificial intelligence and decision science.

Eric Horvitz studied the use of probability and utility to guide automated reasoning for decision making.

Eric Horvitz introduced the anytime algorithm paradigm in AI, where partial results, probabilities, or utilities of outcomes are refined with computation under different availabilities or costs of time, guided by the expected value of computation.

Eric Horvitz has explored synergies between human and machine intelligence.

Eric Horvitz introduced principles for using machine learning and decision theory to guide machine versus human initiative, methods that provide AI systems with understandings of when to transfer problem solving to humans, and the use of machine learning and planning techniques to identify and merge the complementary abilities of people and AI systems.

Eric Horvitz introduced models of human attention in computing systems, and studied the use of machine learning to infer the cost of interruptions to computer users.

Eric Horvitz investigated the use of AI methods to provide assistance to users including help with software and in the daily life.

Eric Horvitz co-authored probability-based methods to enhance privacy, including a model of altruistic sharing of data called community sensing and risk-sensitive approaches including stochastic privacy.

Eric Horvitz led efforts in applying AI methods to computing systems, including machine learning for memory management in Windows, web prefetching, graphics rendering, and web crawling.

Eric Horvitz did early work on AI for debugging software.

Eric Horvitz speaks on the topic of artificial intelligence, including on NPR and the Charlie Rose show.

Eric Horvitz's research has been featured in The New York Times and MIT Technology Review.

Eric Horvitz has testified before the US Senate on progress, opportunities, and challenges with AI.

Eric Horvitz has addressed technical and societal challenges and opportunities with the fielding of AI technologies in the open world, including beneficial uses of AI, AI safety and robustness, and where AI systems and capabilities can have inadvertent effects, pose dangers, or be misused.

Eric Horvitz has presented on caveats with applications of AI in military settings.

Eric Horvitz has called for action on potential risks to civil liberties posed by government uses of data in AI systems.

Eric Horvitz has presented on the risks of AI-enabled deepfakes and contributed to media provenance technologies that cryptographically certify the source and history of edits of digital content.

In 2014, Eric Horvitz defined and funded with his wife the One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University.

Eric Horvitz founded and chairs the Aether Committee at Microsoft, Microsoft's internal committee on the responsible development and fielding of AI technologies.

Eric Horvitz reported that the Aether Committee had made recommendations on and guided decisions that have influenced Microsoft's commercial AI efforts.