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Team Members
Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi
Co-Founder & President
Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi is a senior lecturer in the discipline of computer science with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, education and healthcare. She has been teaching AI for ten years at Columbia University to hundreds of students per year and the AI Micromasters online on EdX which attracted over a quarter million learners from 200 countries since 2017. Ansaf is the recipient of several awards including the Eighth Symposium on EAAI New and Future AI Educators and the NIH-NICHD Decoding Maternal Morbidity Data Challenge. More information can be found at: cs.columbia.edu/~ansaf
Uzay Macar
Co-Founder & Vice-President
Uzay Macar is a computer scientist by training and an entrepreneur working at the intersection of healthcare and technology. He graduated from Columbia University in 2021 where he specialized in artificial intelligence and its applications. He is dedicated to computer science education, and has taken part in various projects on teaching programming to young age groups. More information can be found at: uzaymacar.com
Noah Mauchly
Art Director
Noah Mauchly is an animator and filmmaker currently based in New Hampshire. He graduated from Kingston University with a BA in Illustration and Animation in 2020. He works primarily in traditional 2D animation, but also explores a range of experimental techniques such as rotoscoping, pixilation, mixed-media stop motion, and sound-based work across a variety of projects, including short films and advertising.
Blake Castleman
Research Assistant
Blake graduated with his BS from Georgia Tech in 2022 and is passionate about the intersection of computer science and education. His current work includes creating personalization systems for Aiphabet curriculum as well as assisting its AI curriculum development.
Michael Jiang
Curriculum Developer
Michael is a student studying computer science and math at University of Michigan. He is passionate about AI and education, particularly in how to create the best learning experiences for students of all social and technical backgrounds. His current work involves developing and refining different parts of Aiphabet's curriculum.
Mehdi Ramdani
Web Developer
Mehdi is a college student interested in web development, economics, and mathematics. His current work includes front-end development as well as content review and development.
Advisory Board
Julia Hirschberg
Julia Hirschberg is Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She previously worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs on text-to-speech synthesis. She is a fellow of AAAI, ISCA, ACL, ACM, and IEEE, and a member of the NAE, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement and the ISCA Special Service Medal. She studies speech and NLP, currently TTS, false information on social media and its intent, multimodal humor, radicalization in videos, and deceptive, trusted, emotional, charismatic, and empathetic speech.
Stuart Russell
Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. He is a recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and has focused his research on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris and received the OBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and gave the Reith Lectures.
Nakul Verma
Nakul Verma is a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, focusing on Machine Learning, Algorithms and Theory. His primary area of research is Machine Learning and High-dimensional Statistics, and is especially interested in understanding and exploiting the intrinsic structure in data to design effective learning algorithms in the big data regime. Dr. Verma received his PhD in 2012 and his BS in 2004 from the University of California San Diego.
Daniel Bauer
Daniel is a Lecturer in the Columbia University Computer Science department, where he teaches courses ranging from introductory Computer Science to graduate-level courses in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 2017. His research interests are in Computational Semantics of natural language and Computer Science education, focusing on making introductory CS courses more accessible for a diverse student population.
Carl Vondrick
Carl Vondrick is an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University. His research group studies computer vision and machine learning. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, Amazon, and Toyota, and his work has appeared on the national news, such as CNN, NPR, and the Associated Press. He received the 2021 NSF CAREER Award, the 2021 Toyota Young Faculty Award, and the 2018 Amazon Research Award. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Google and he received his PhD from MIT in 2017.
Nathan Holbert
Nathan Holbert is an Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work involves the development and study of playful tools, environments, and activities that allow all children to leverage computational power as they build, test, tinker, and make sense of personally meaningful topics, phenomena, or questions. Nathan received his Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University and is the founder and director of the Snow Day Learning Lab.