Randall Davis

Randall Davis is a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), holding an Esther and Harold Edgerton Endowed Chair (1979-1981). He has served in leadership roles including Associate Director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1993-1998), Research Director of CSAIL (2003-2007), and Associate Director of CSAIL (2012-2014). His research focuses on human-computer interaction, knowledge-based systems, and medical technology applications. He co-authored Knowledge-Based Systems in AI and pioneered systems like DCTClock, recognized as one of Time's Best Inventions (2021).

Education: B.S. (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Dartmouth (1970), Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford (1976).

• Key Awards: Founding Fellow of AAAI (1990), USAF Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service (1998), AAAI President (1995)
• Intellectual Property Contributions: Expert in Computer Associates v. Altai case (1990), led National Academy of Sciences study The Digital Dilemma (2000)

His work integrates multimodal interaction (speech, gesture, sketch) to create intuitive human-computer interfaces, with recent focus on cognitive assessment tools for early Alzheimer’s detection. He leads MIT's Human-Computer Interaction research group within CSAIL.