Fireside Chat with Susan Athey

Fireside chat with Susan Athey and Eric Horvitz.

Speaker Details

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.

Economics of Technology Professor Susan Athey

Susan Athey is The Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her Ph.D. from Stanford, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Duke University. She previously taught at the economics departments at MIT, Stanford and Harvard. In 2007, Professor Athey received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to “that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” She was elected to the National Academy of Science in 2012 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. Professor Athey’s research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and econometrics, marketplace design, and the economics of digitization. She advises governments and businesses on marketplace design and platform economics, serving as consulting chief economist to Microsoft for a number of years, and serving on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Ripple.