Maine Voices Live Waterville features conversations between Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal writers and notable Mainers. Audience members can experience a memorable night with a Q&A at the end.

Amanda Stent is the inaugural director of the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Colby College. She is considered one of the leading authorities on natural language processing (NLP), the branch of AI that provides computers with the ability to understand human text and spoken words, and was involved in the work that directly led to a wide range of NLP applications, most notably the virtual assistant Siri.

Before joining Colby she led the People and Language AI Team at Bloomberg, and also worked as a research scientist at Yahoo Labs and AT&T Labs.

Prior joining the private sector, Stent was an associate professor at Stony Brook University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and co-author of The Princess at the Keyboard: Why Girls Should Become Computer Scientists.

Amanda will be interviewed by Kennebec Journal reporter Jessica Lowell for this virtual, streaming event.

Jessica Lowell covers business and economic development and general news in the Gardiner area for the Kennebec Journal. After short but intense aspirations to be an opera singer (age 4) and a deep-sea diver (age 6) her most enduring passion has been telling stories. A University of Maine graduate, she worked for newspapers in New Hampshire, upstate New York and Wyoming, where she has won awards for investigative and explanatory journalism. She’s a fellow of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. After several years out of journalism, she returned to Maine and to writing, where she spends her free time enjoying both trees and the ocean.