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"Kristian “Kris” Hammond" is an American computer scientist, Artificial Intelligence researcher and business executive. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of Narrative Science. He is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. He is also a director of the Medill/McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism at Northwestern University.

Education
Hammond graduated from Yale University in 1979, receiving a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. He then went on to earn a Master’s degree and PhD in Computer Science from Yale University in 1982 and 1986, respectively. His discertation, Case-Based Planning: Viewing Planning As a Memory Task, was focused on the automatic generation and learning of plans of action based on a process model of memory rather than rules.

Academia
In 1986, after completing his education at Yale, Hammond joined the faculty at The University of Chicago where he served as a professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Psychology and founded the school’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Under his leadership and with funding from NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, the Whitaker Foundation, Apple Computer, McKinsey and Microsoft Research, the laboratory thrived for over a decade as a center for innovative artificial intelligence research.

In 1998, Hammond moved to Northwestern University, where he formed the Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab). At the InfoLab, his team focuses on creating technology that bridges the gap between people and information.

During his time at Northwestern, Kris Hammond was a faculty advisor for a Northwestern research project called StatsMonkey, a software prototype that automatically generated baseball game recaps.

Research
Hammond’s research focus is on the fundamental issues of Artificial Intelligence and the use of intelligent systems in improving human/computer interaction. One of the primary foci of this work has been in the area of the automatic generation of compelling content and experiences based on the narrative structure and audience needs. This work is currently embodied in the concept of Narrative Analytics.

Professional life
In 2010, Kris Hammond co-founded Narrative Science, an artificial intelligence company that automatically generates stories and reporting from structured data, with Larry Birnbaum and Stuart Frankel based on the StatsMonkey prototype. He serves as Chief Scientist for the company. Before Narrative Science, Hammond spent a year as the weekly technology correspondent for WTTW's Chicago Tomorrow from 2000 to 2001. He also served as a consultant at AllVoices, Inc. from 2006 to 2007.

Over the years, four companies have been based on Hammond’s technologies: Verb, Media River, AllVoices and Narrative Science.

Kris currently sits on a United Nations policy committee run by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

Scholarly works
Hammond is an accomplished researcher in the areas of human-machine interaction, context-driven information systems, and artificial intelligence with work published in several academic journals. A selection of his scholarly works and articles, are the following;