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Honors and Awards

Kristian Hammond Elected 2023 AAAI Fellow

Hammond was recognized for his significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has elected Northwestern Engineering’s Kristian Hammond as one of its 2023 Fellows.

Kristian HammondFounded in 1979, AAAI is a nonprofit, scientific society dedicated to promoting the research and responsible use of AI technology. The AAAI Fellows program recognizes members who have made significant, sustained contributions — typically spanning at least a 10-year period — to the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Nominated by AAAI membership, fellows have achieved unusual distinction in the field and pioneered advances in the theory or practice of AI.

Hammond is the Bill and Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science at the McCormick School of Engineering. He is the director of the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI), a collaboration with the UL Research Institutes' Digital Safety Research Institute. Launched in 2022, CASMI is developing best practices for the evaluation, design, and development of machine intelligence that is safe, equitable, and beneficial.

Hammond is among the cohort of 11 members named 2023 AAAI Fellows. He will be formally honored during the AAAI Fellows awards ceremony held during the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence next month in Washington, DC.

An AI pioneer and entrepreneur, Hammond is a leading researcher in language generation. He directs the Cognition, Creativity, and Communication (C3) Lab, which aims to build innovative machine learning and natural language processing platforms that advance AI into new application realms, and to explore the impact of computer science and AI on society, ethics, and human experience.

A member of Northwestern faculty since 1999, Hammond is the founding director of the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence program, which launched in September 2018. Students gain technical skills in the emerging technologies of machine intelligence within the context of the human environments in which the systems will be deployed.

Hammond cofounded Narrative Science in January 2010, a startup that uses AI and journalism to turn information from raw data into natural, narrative language.