Tom
Hope

Dr. Tom Hope is a new faculty member in the Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research scientist at The Allen Institute for AI (AI2).

Tom develops artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) methods to augment and scale scientific knowledge discovery by harnessing vast and diverse repositories of scientific knowledge.

He aims to create computational methods that mine scientific literature and knowledge bases to help discover new directions and solutions to problems, generate hypotheses, make predictions and decisions, and build connections across different ideas and areas. As an Azrieli Fellow, Tom will explore AI and NLP methods for automatically extracting and organizing all mentions of challenges and directions across the scientific literature, including specific limitations, uncertainties, hypotheses and promising findings. This will enable systems that can detect and monitor areas of difficulty and gaps in knowledge and recommend new directions for problem- solving across the sciences.

Tom completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Dafna Shahaf, working on using machine learning to augment creativity. His work received four best paper awards and appeared in high impact journals, including Nature and Science. While pursuing his PhD, Tom also led an applied AI research team at Intel. He conducted postdoctoral research at AI2 (Semantic Scholar group) and the University of Washington, working with Prof. Daniel Weld and Prof. Eric Horvitz to create systems that help scientists and medical doctors dealing with COVID-19 to find important knowledge and identify new research directions. Tom was selected for the Global Young Scientists Summit (2021) and the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (2019) and was a member of the SIGKDD Best Paper Award Committee (2020). He lives with his wife, Elia, and son, Jordan, in Jerusalem.