Ashwin Ram (born July 27, 1960) is an Indian-American computer scientist. He was

chief innovation officer A Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) or Chief Technology Innovation Officer (CTIO) is a person in a company who is primarily responsible for managing the process of innovation and change management in an organization, as well as being in some cases th ...

at PARC from 2011 to 2016, and published books and scientific articles and helped start at least two companies.

Biography

Ashwin Ram was born in

New Delhi New Delhi (, , ''Naī Dillī'') is the capital of India and a part of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). New Delhi is the seat of all three branches of the government of India, hosting the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Parliament Ho ...

, India, on July 27, 1960. He is a great-grandson of Sir

Ganga Ram Rai Bahadur Sir Ganga Ram (born Ganga Ram Agarwal; 13 April 1851 – 10 July 1927) was an Indian civil engineer and architect. His extensive contributions to the urban fabric of Lahore, then in colonial India and now in modern Pakistan, cau ...

and is the eldest of three children. He grew up in New Delhi with a brief stint in Bombay, and attended one of India's oldest boarding schools,

Mayo College Mayo College (informally Mayo) is a boys-only independent boarding school in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India. It was founded in 1875 by Richard Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo, who was the Viceroy of India from 1869 to 1872. This makes it one of the oldest pu ...

. Ram received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, in 1982, where he received the President of India's Gold Medal for best undergraduate performance. He then traveled to the US, graduating with his M.S. in computer science from the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

in 1984. He received his Ph.D. degree from

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

for his dissertation on "Question-Driven Understanding: An Integrated Theory of Story Understanding, Memory, and Learning" in 1989, under advisor

Roger Schank Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within th ...

and Gerald DeJong.

Georgia Tech

He joined the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1989. He was associate professor in the School of

interactive computing In computer science, interactive computing refers to software which accepts input from the user as it runs. Interactive software includes commonly used programs, such as word processors or spreadsheet applications. By comparison, non-interactive ...

in the College of Computing, an associate professor of cognitive science, an adjunct professor in the School of

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

, and an adjunct professor in math and computer science at

Emory University Emory University is a private research university in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1836 as "Emory College" by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory, Emory is the second-oldest private institution of ...

. In 1995 Ram co-edited (with David B. Leake) a book on

goal-oriented Goal orientation, or achievement orientation, is an "individual disposition towards developing or validating one's ability in achievement settings". In general, an individual can be said to be ''mastery'' or ''performance'' oriented, based on whethe ...

learning. He co-edited (with Kenneth Moorman) a book on

natural language understanding Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subtopic of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an A ...

. Ram founded Enkia Corporation in 1998 (which was purchased by Sentiment360 in 2011). He then co-founded Inquus Corporation, which operated OpenStudy, an online social learning network for students and faculty, and medical information company Cobot Health Corporation. OpenStudy was acquired in 2016 by

Brainly Brainly is a company based in Kraków, Poland, with headquarters in New York City. It is social learning platform where students and educators solve their academic problems together Brainly's mission is to inspire students to share and explore ...

. Ram directed the Cognitive Computing Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology starting around 2006. He led research in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

(AI) and cognitive science. His projects focused on AI for computer games and virtual worlds, consumer health and wellness, and educational technologies. Topics included knowledge-based machine learning,

case-based reasoning In artificial intelligence and philosophy, case-based reasoning (CBR), broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems. In everyday life, an auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recallin ...

cognitive model A cognitive model is an approximation of one or more cognitive processes in humans or other animals for the purposes of comprehension and prediction. There are many types of cognitive models, and they can range from box-and-arrow diagrams to a set ...

ing, and natural language processing. He was program chair and conference co-chair of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) in 1994, conference co-chair of the Third International Conference on the Learning Sciences (ICLS) in 1998, and program co-chair of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition in 2008.

PARC

Ashwin Ram became an innovation fellow at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC), around September 2011, and then chief innovation officer. His team created social computing technologies to augment human cognition in application areas including health and wellness. He was program co-chair of the International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) in November 2011, with Nirmalie Wiratunga. In June 2013, he was interviewed on Australian radio about the trends toward finding medical information on the Internet, and was invited as a keynote speaker at the Amplify Festival.

Amazon

In May, 2016, he joined the

Amazon Alexa Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It was first used in the Amazon Echo smart speaker and the Echo Dot, Echo Studio ...

development team as head of

Google

In 2018 he left Amazon and joined Google as technical director of AI for Google Cloud.
Amazon Alexa’s head AI researcher has left for Google
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References

External links

Ashwin Ram at Georgia Tech

Ashwin Ram's Research Blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ram, Ashwin Living people 1960 births American computer scientists Indian cognitive scientists Georgia Tech faculty Yale University alumni Artificial intelligence researchers IIT Delhi alumni Scientists at PARC (company) Indian emigrants to the United States American people of Indian descent