Brent Hecht

About

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 (opens in new tab)and leads Northwestern’s People, Space, and Algorithms (PSA) Research Group (opens in new tab).

Dr. Hecht has been doing award-winning human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) research for over 10 years and his work has been particularly influential in language modeling, responsible AI and their intersection. His early work was central in identifying what we now call ‘algorithmic bias’. 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 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 (opens in new tab), the premiere publication venue for responsible AI research, and he played a key role in catalyzing the rapidly growing movement for AI researchers (e.g. NeurIPS authors (opens in new tab)) to more deeply engage with the societal impacts of their work.

For more information, visit Dr. Hecht’s personal website (opens in new tab) and see his CV (opens in new tab).