Eric Horvitz



Distinguished Scientist & Co-Director
Microsoft Research

I'm serving as managing co-director of the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond, balancing labwide responsibilities with ongoing research efforts in the realm of machine learning and intelligence, with links to decision science, human-computer interaction, biomedical informatics, and information retrieval. The Microsoft Research home page is a starting point for browsing through projects, events, and people at the lab at Redmond, and for our sister labs in the U.S. and throughout the world. Students may find these career reflections by computer scientists interesting and inspirational--stemming from an event that we organized to mark the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research.

Research overview

I'm interested in principles of sensing, learning, and decision making under uncertainty. My interests include computational models of perception, reflection, and action. Beyond theoretical models, I pursue the development and fielding of applications in several realms, including time-critical decisions, information retrieval, healthcare, urban infrastructure, sustainability, and development--with goals of understanding how computational models perform amidst real-world complexities, and of deploying systems that deliver value to people and society. Related interests include machine learning and decision making for crowdsourcing and human computation, information triage and alerting that takes human attention into consideration, spanning work on notification systems, surprise modeling, multitasking, and psychological studies of interruption and recovery. Other interests include principles of mixed-initiative interaction that can support fluid, efficient collaborations between people and computing systems, methods for guiding computer actions in accordance with the preferences of people, search and information retrieval, and collaboration. On the more theoretical front, I've been long interested in offline and real-time optimization of the expected value of computational systems under limited and varying resources. Areas of concentration in this realm include flexible or anytime computation, ideal metareasoning for guiding computation, compilation for reducing real-time deliberation, ongoing, continual computation, and the construction of bounded-optimal reasoning systems--systems that maximize the expected utility of the people they serve, given the expected costs of reasoning, the problems encountered over time, and assertions about a system's constitution. Research in this arena includes tackling hard reasoning problems with learning and decision making methods.

Recent activities

Recently completed cycle of service as president and then past-president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and remain active with AAAI strategic planning. Working this year on a project to kickoff a new AAAI conference on human computation and crowdsourcing, to serve an exciting and evolving community. Incoming chair of the Section on Information, Computing, and Communication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), representing AAAS members with interests in computation. Also serving on the council of the Computing Community Consortium, an organization that works to envision computing futures--and to stoke the fires of creativity within our community. Fellow of the AAAI, AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Recently elected to the CHI Academy.


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