Wiki Workshop 2024

Dr. Brent Hecht is Director of Applied Science at Microsoft, where he is helping lead the company-wide efforts to introduce generative AI into Microsoft’s products and to adapt Microsoft’s products to a hybrid work world. Dr. Hecht has an additional appointment as an Associate Professor at Northwestern University and leads Northwestern’s People, Space, and Algorithms (PSA) Research Group. Dr. Brent Hecht has been doing award-winning human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) research for over 10 years. His early work was central in identifying what we now call ‘algorithmic bias’. More recently, he did some of the first research on ways for content producers to have a say in how their content is used in AI models like LLMs, defining what we now call ‘data labor’ and ‘data leverage’. He is the recipient of a CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation and his work has received Best Paper recognition at top-tier publication venues in human-centered AI (e.g. ACM SIGCHI, ACM KDD, ACM CSCW, ACM Mobile HCI, AAAI ICWSM). Dr. Hecht’s research has been featured by The New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, MIT Tech Review, the Atlantic, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and other outlets. He was on the founding executive committee of ACM FAccT, the premiere publication venue for responsible AI research, he played a key role in catalyzing the rapidly growing movement for AI researchers (e.g. NeurIPS authors) to more deeply engage with the societal impacts of their work, and is a founding member of the Responsible AI Licenses Initiative, which defined the release license for Stable Diffusion and Hugging Face’s LLMs.