Fireside Chat with Tuomas Sandholm

Fireside Chat with Tuomas Sandholm and Eric Horvitz.

Speaker Bios

CVP/Technical Fellow Eric Horvitz

Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow and director at Microsoft Research. He has made contributions in areas of machine learning, perception, natural language understanding, decision making, and human-AI collaboration. His efforts and collaborations have led to fielded systems in healthcare, transportation, ecommerce, operating systems, and aerospace. He received the Feigenbaum Prize and the Allen Newell Prize for contributions to AI. He has been elected fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) , Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as president of the AAAI, and on advisory committees for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, DARPA, and the Allen Institute for AI. Beyond technical work, he has pursued efforts and studies on the influences of AI on people and society, including issues around ethics, law, and safety. He established the One Hundred Year Study on AI and served as a founder and co-chair of the Partnership on AI to Support People and Society. Eric received PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University. More information can be found on his home page.

Professor in the Computer Science Department, Tuomas Sandholm

Tuomas Sandholm has published over 450 papers. In parallel with his academic career, he was Founder, Chairman, and CTO/Chief Scientist of CombineNet, Inc. from 1997 until its acquisition in 2010. During this period the company commercialized over 800 of the world’s largest-scale generalized combinatorial auctions, with over $60 billion in total spend and over $6 billion in generated savings. He is Founder and CEO of Optimized Markets, which is bringing a new optimization-powered paradigm to advertising campaign sales, scheduling, and pricing—in TV (linear and nonlinear), streaming (video and audio), display, mobile, game, and cross-media advertising. His algorithms also run the UNOS kidney exchange, which includes 69% of the transplant centers in the US. He has developed the leading algorithms for several general classes of game. The team that he leads is the multi-time world champion in computer Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em. He is Founder and CEO of Strategic Machine and Strategy Robot, which provide solutions for strategic reasoning under imperfect information in a broad range of applications. He served as the redesign consultant of Baidu’s sponsored search auctions and display advertising markets 2009-2013; within two years Baidu’s market cap increased 5x to $50 billion due to doubled monetization per user. He has served as consultant, advisor, or board member for Yahoo!, Google, Chicago Board Options Exchange, swap.com, Granata Decision Systems, and others. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science and a Dipl. Eng. with distinction in Industrial Engineering and Management Science. Among his many honors are the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, inaugural ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award, Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, Sloan Fellowship, Carnegie Science Center Award for Excellence, Edelman Laureateship, and NSF Career Award. He is Fellow of the ACM, AAAI, and INFORMS. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich.