I’m thrilled that AI is actually out there in the world making a difference because I didn’t think that it would happen in my lifetime—because it seemed the problems were so hard.
HIGGINS PROFESSOR OF NATURAL SCIENCES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Barbara J. Gros Barbara J. Grosz is Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. Over the course of her career, she has made ground-breaking contributions in artificial intelligence that have led to the foundational principles of dialogue processing that are important for personal assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. In 1993, she became the first woman to serve as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
MARTIN FORD: What initially drove you to be interested in artificial intelligence, and how did your career progress?
BARBARA GROSZ: My career was a series of happy accidents. I went to college thinking I would be a 7th-grade math teacher because my 7th-grade math...