Brent Hecht

About

Dr. Brent Hecht is Director of Applied Science and a Partner at Microsoft, where he leads a team of researchers dedicated to some of the hardest and highest-value opportunities for AI in productivity scenarios. Dr. Hecht’s areas of focus include private and trustworthy approaches to fine-tuning and AI analytics, AI systems for teamwork, and goal-driven AI systems. Dr. Hecht also co-leads Microsoft’s cross-company initiative dedicated to understanding and improving the future of work, as well initiatives that are measuring the business value and productivity gains afforded by AI.

Dr. Hecht has an additional appointment as an Affiliate Associate Professor at Northwestern University, where he was an Associate Professor prior to coming to Microsoft. His research at Northwestern (opens in new tab) focuses on developing sustainable AI content ecosystems in which AI users, AI companies, and content and data producers all benefit.

More broadly, Dr. Hecht has been doing award-winning human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) research for over 15 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 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).