Dr Susan Dumais
Technical Fellow & Managing Director
Microsoft Research New England

Susan Dumais is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, directing Research Labs in Cambridge, New York City, and Montréal, and an adjunct professor at the University of Washington. Before, she was at Bell Labs where she developed Latent Semantic Analysis, an early word embedding technique for search.  Her current research focuses on large-scale language modeling, behavioral log analysis, personalization, and email search. Susan has published widely in information retrieval (IR), human-computer interaction (HCI), and cognitive science. Susan contributed to search innovations across Microsoft Bing, Windows, SharePoint, and Office. She is an ACM Fellow, was elected to the CHI and SIGIR Academies, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). Her outstanding contributions in IR have been recognized with SIGIR Gerard Salton Award and Tony Kent Strix Award. Her pioneering work in computer science and HCI has awarded the ACM Athena Lecturer, SIGCHI Lifetime Research Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award from Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Science.

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Prof Chirag Shah
Information and Computer Science
University of Washington

Chirag Shah is Professor of Information and Computer Science at University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. He is the Founding Director for InfoSeeking Lab and Founding Co-Director of Center for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences (RAISE). He works in the area of intelligent information access systems, focusing on task-oriented search, proactive recommendations, and conversational systems. He is also engaged in work with generative AI, specifically in information access and image classification problems. In addition to creating AI-driven information access systems that provide more personalized reactive and proactive recommendations, he is also focusing on making such systems transparent, fair, and free of biases.

Shah is a Distinguished Member of Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) as well as Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). He is the recipient of the 2019 Microsoft BCS/IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award. He has published nearly 200 peer-reviewed articles and authored seven books, including text books on data science and machine learning. He also works closely with industrial research labs on cutting-edge problems, typically as a visiting researcher. The most recent engagements included Spotify (2018), Amazon (2019), MSR AI (2020), Getty Images (2021), and Microsoft Research (2023).

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