Matthew Lease

Leadership Team: Good Systems, a UT Austin Grand Challenge to design responsible AI technologies (2019-2027)

Areas (broad): Artificial Intelligence (AI) • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Areas (specific): Crowdsourcing & Human Computation (HCOMP) • Fair & Explainable AI • Information Retrieval (IR) • Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Overview: My lab's research spans artificial Intelligence (AI) modeling and human-computer interaction (HCI) design. We create novel datasets, build AI models, and evaluate model performance and end-user impacts. 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. As part of the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI), we are also working to accelerate scientific discovery with AI.

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).