Kristian Hammond is the Bill and Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University and the co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence company Narrative Science (recently acquired by Salesforce). He has spent most of his career focused on the problem of making machines smarter. His research is aimed at bridging the human/machine communication gap between the data we gather and the information that is locked within it.

Since the fall of 2016, he has been the faculty lead of Northwestern’s CS + X initiative, exploring how computational thinking can be used to transform fields such as the law, medicine, and education. He also directs Northwestern’s Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) as well as the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI). In January of 2023, he was named a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

He believes in humanizing computers with the aim of stopping the process of mechanizing people. Kris received his PhD from Yale.