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 (; ) is the Capital city, capital of India and a part of the Delhi, National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). New Delhi is the seat of all three branches of the Government of India, hosting the Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Parliament ...

, 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. In view of his extensive contributions to the urban fabric of Lahore, then in Pre-Independence India and now in mod ...

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. Ram received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the

Indian Institute of Technology The Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are a network of engineering and technology institutions in India. Established in 1950, they are under the purview of the Ministry of Education of the Indian Government and are governed by the Instit ...

, New Delhi, in 1982, where he received the

President of India The president of India (ISO 15919, ISO: ) is the head of state of the Republic of India. The president is the nominal head of the executive, the first citizen of the country, and the commander-in-chief, supreme commander of the Indian Armed ...

'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 (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

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

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

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 (March 12, 1946 – January 29, 2023) was an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual d ...

and Gerald DeJong.

Georgia Tech

He joined the faculty at the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, GT, and simply Tech or the Institute) is a public university, public research university and Institute of technology (United States), institute of technology in Atlanta, ...

(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-interactiv ...

in the College of Computing, an associate professor of

cognitive science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

, an adjunct professor in the School of

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

, and an adjunct professor in math and computer science at

Emory University Emory University is a private university, private research university in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It was founded in 1836 as Emory College by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory. Its main campu ...

. 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 whe ...

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

natural language understanding Natural language understanding (NLU) or natural language interpretation (NLI) is a subset of natural language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. NLU has been considered an AI-hard problem. Ther ...

. 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 an education technology company based in Kraków, Poland, with headquarters in New York City. It operates a user generated question and answer platform for students. History Initially called Zadane.pl, the company was founded in 20 ...

. Ram directed the Cognitive Computing Lab at the

starting around 2006. He led research in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(AI) and

. 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 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 recalling another car that exhibited similar sympto ...

cognitive model A cognitive model is a representation 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 se ...

ing, and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

. He was program chair and conference co-chair of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the

Cognitive Science Society The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society prom ...

(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 is a virtual assistant technology marketed by Amazon and implemented in software applications for smart phones, tablets, wireless smart speakers, and other electronic appliances. Alexa was largely developed from a Polish speech s ...

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 academics of Indian descent People from New Delhi