The past and future of AI: A chat with Barbara Grosz

Barbara Grosz , Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has spent her career working to make human-computer interactions as fluent as human-to-human interaction. In pursuit of that goal, Grosz has explored the foundations of dialogue, the fundamental characteristics of teamwork, and has revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence not once but twice. Her first major breakthrough was to create the first computational model of discourse, which spawned an entirely new field of research and influenced language-processing technologies. Next, with colleagues, she completely rethought how multi-agent systems collaborate as a team, once again leading the field to a new frontier of discovery.  "Most researchers are bricklayers, moving the field forward step-by-step," said Michael Wooldridge, head of the department of computer science at Oxford University. "But the real leaders are the people who see the big picture - the architects of the fields. Barbara is one of those architects. She has shaped the direction of the field in a fundamental way." Grosz was awarded the Research Excellence Award of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence at their meeting in Buenos Aires for her pioneering work in multi-agent systems and natural language processing.