Patrick Ehlen, PhD
CHIEF AI ADVISOR
Patrick has pursued artificial intelligence since 3rd grade, after reading Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1992, inspired by the Parallel Distributed Processing volumes, he trained his first neural network to learn distributed representations of concepts.
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Patrick earned a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the New School for Social Research, where he was awarded the Dissertation Fellowship, the Alfred J. Marrow Memorial Award in Psychology, and was the first recipient of a Charles Cannell Fund award from the University of Michigan for his work on mathematical modeling of concept processing. While completing the PhD, he interned at
speech recognition pioneer Dragon Systems (later acquired by Nuance) and then at AT&T Labs-Research, trailblazing innovations in speech and multimodal understanding technology. He then moved to the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), an AI mecca at Stanford University.
As a research scientist at Stanford's Computational Semantics Lab, he worked on the $200M DARPA CALO AI project and devised machine learning methods to extract concepts and topics from ordinary, spontaneous conversations. In 2008, he returned to AT&T in San Francisco to join a fledgling R&D group at AT&T Interactive. There he led research in developing AT&T Speak4it, the first mobile app to employ cloud-based speech recognition, and later the first app to recognize simultaneous speech and gesture to perform a multimodal search. Patrick also helped release AT&T’s Speech API, a cloud-based speech recognition service.
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Patrick has been awarded ten U.S. patents and has produced over 70 research publications in the areas of computational semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, word sense disambiguation, human concept learning, and artificial intelligence. His work is cited in over 1500 scientific papers. He serves on the Advisory Board for Digility, a conference and expo on Digital Reality, and also for The Flight Exchange, a charter aircraft booking platform company.