ABOUT
Hugo Liu, Ph.D. is a taste researcher and technologist working toward new empowerments and insights into food, fashion, lifestyle, and consumer culture by computational means.
He is a research affiliate of the MIT Media Laboratory and MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, where he has taught courses on artificial intelligence, and philosophy of aesthetics. He previously held the British Telecom Fellowship, and the America On-Line Fellowship at the Media Lab. With expertise in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, and a bent for aesthetics and critical theory, Liu's doctoral dissertation pioneered the computational modeling and simulation of people's tastes from 'psychoanalytic readings' of their personal texts.
He has authored over 30 journal, magazine, conference, and workshop articles on topics including sentiment analysis, commonsense reasoning, taste modeling, and consumer aesthetics. Liu's research is recognized with two best paper prizes, and has been written up in places like New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, Slashdot, and on leading techno-art blogs.
Qua computer-foodie, Liu developed The Synesthetic Cookbook--an interactive collection of 160,000 recipes that can be explored by tastes, moods, and imagery--and Gulp Fiction, a self-composing cookbook that remixes known influences into new recipes. Developed in collaboration with MIT's Counter Intelligence Group and Harvard culinary historian Barbara Wheaton, The Synesthetic Cookbook was featured in New York Times Magazine's 2005 Year In Ideas issue. Liu was an invited speaker at the inaugural Taste3 Wine-Food-Art conference commemorating Robert Mondavi Winery's 40th Anniversary, and served on the speaking faculty at the 2007 Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers.
His recent editorial works include a AAAI-06 workshop volume on Computational Aesthetics: AI Approaches to Beauty and Happiness, distributed by AAAI Press, and a journal special issue on the Semantics of People and Culture for the Int'l Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, published by IGI Global. He is slated to co-EIC the new Int'l Journal of Entertainment Technology and Management, published by InderScience. Liu is a faculty advisor to MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium, and serves on the program committees of numerous AI and computational linguistics conferences.
Liu is the author of the popular NLP/AI packages, Montylingua, and ConceptNet. Through his taste consultancy, he advises and helps bring to fruition a portfolio of cutting edge ventures in the advertising, reputation, and tastemaking spaces, including SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee Inc.) and ScanScout.com.
Liu holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, and bachelors and masters degrees in Computer Science. He is a biographee of Marquis Who's Who of Emerging Leaders, 1st edition.