Ethan Fast

Long-term Trends in the Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has a long history of boom and bust cycles.

During A.I. booms, money flows through universities and industry labs, fueling promised advances that often sound like…

What’s in an Inauguration Speech? A Lexical Analysis via Empath

Last year we published Empath, a tool for text analysis, which was fortunate enough to win a Best Paper award at CHI. Empath allows researchers to analyze text over a much larger set of categories than are available in…

The Best Fiction I Read in 2016

I read fewer books in 2016 than I have in the past (30 or so novels, which is half what I used to consume during high school or college). Despite this, I still encountered a lot of amazing work. I’ve always enjoyed reading year-end book lists and admired the people who take…