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Matthew Lease
Professor 1616 Guadalupe Ste 5.202 Voice: (512) 471-9350 • Fax: (512) 471-3971
Lab: Artificial Intelligence and Human-Centered Computing (AI&HCC) |
Co-Director: NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI, 2024-2029)
Leadership Team: Good Systems, a UT Austin Grand Challenge to design responsible AI technologies (2019-2027)
Teaching INF 391D.11: The Research Enterprise (Spring 2025)
Research
Areas (specific):
Crowdsourcing & Human Computation (HCOMP) •
Fair & Explainable AI •
Information Retrieval (IR) •
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Overview: My lab creates novel datasets, builds AI models, and evaluates model performance and end-user impacts, predominantly on natural language tasks. When automated AI falls short, we design human-in-the-loop approaches supported by AI model explanations and creative user interfaces. To promote fair AI, we design better ways to annotate data without bias and modeling techniques to mitigate dataset biases. We conduct fundamental research, applied to real-world problems that matter, as part of UT Austin's Good Systems Grand Challenge to design responsible AI technologies. One theme of ongoing work is automated, human-in-the-loop, and human-safe practices to safeguard the information environment online against threats such as hate speech, extremism, and foreign influence.
Brief Biography. Matthew Lease is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and an Amazon Scholar. Lease co-directs the $20M NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI)> and is a faculty founder and leader of UT’s Good Systems, an eight-year, $20M university-wide Grand Challenge aimed at designing responsible AI technologies. In 2023-2024, Lease was invited four times to address the Texas Legislature on responsible AI. His recent awards include the 2024 Inaugural Test of Time Paper Award at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP), the 2024 Most Influential Paper Award at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2024 Best Paper Honorable Mention at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Best Student Paper at the 2022 Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), the Conference Award Track in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR, 2020), and Best Student Paper at the 2019 European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR). Lease is also the recipient of three Early Career awards: from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS). Lease received degrees in Computer Science from Brown University (PhD, MSc) and the University of Washington (BSc).
SELECTED PAST RESEARCH EVENTS
SELECTED PAST NEWS
Two papers presented at ACL 2017; read the story (August 3, 2017)
Grant for developing Arabic Websearch technologies (November 4, 2015) Quoted in SELECTED PAST FUNDING
SELECTED PAST UT AUSTIN EVENTS
PAST AFFILIATIONS
My Ph.D./M.D. brother Kevin Lease makes iPhone applications for doctors, particularly for geriatrics
Using Crowds to Teach AI How to Search Smarter (August 16, 2017)
Version 2.0 released of SQUARE: benchmarking Software for aggregating crowd responses (October 26, 2015)
We have two papers appearing at AAAI HCOMP 2015 (June 17, 2015)
Hyun Joon Jung Receives 2015 Samsung Human-Tech Paper Award (Feburary 11, 2015)
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is Not Anonymous:
Blog 3/6/13 ·
Paper 3/7/13 ·
TheVerge 3/7/13 ·
Press Release 3/27/13 ·
Talk 5/1/13
The Future of Crowd Work: Paper 12/12/12 ·
Blog 2/6/13 ·
Press Release 2/7/13 ·
New Scientist 2/7/13 ·
New York Times 3/18/13
MIT Technology Review: Baidu’s Duer Joins the Virtual Assistant Party (September 10, 2015)
Speech Technology: Siri-ous Influence: Enterprise Virtual Assistants Have Arrived (November 10, 2012)
Austin American Statesman: Digital Savant: Sensors bringing technology ever nearer (October 23, 2012) (UT Research Alert coverage)
Science News: Digital bounty hunters unleashed (October 31, 2011)
Data Breach Examiner: Privacy Without Borders: The Ins and Outs of Outsourcing (August 2011)
ONR
Yahoo! Faculty Research Award
Amazon
New York Community Trust (August 2, 2012)
LIFT award: announcement (August 4, 2010) and follow-on article (March 11, 2011)
Amazon sponsorship for TREC Crowdsourcing Track (August 31, 2010)
Portugal FCT (July 26, 2010)
Android.edu (April 23, 2010)
Amazon (March 23, 2010)
UT Austin iSchool Open House: 2013
· 2012
· 2011
· 2010
UT Austin Workshop on Student Research in Information Retrieval and Web Search (May 7 & 13, 2010)
Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst (lab reunion at SIGIR'09)
Spoken Language Systems Laboratory (LSV), Saarland University
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL), Charles University
Intel Research Seattle at the University of Washington
Information Science involves a surprising amount of flexibility
Thanks to Vance Faber I have a pseudo Erdös number of 2. Nothing more to accomplish, right?