Jason Mars says that for more than a century, the realm of science fiction has teased the collective human consciousness with a near-unfathomable amount of potential technological innovations that could be invented, improved upon, and commercialized to improve global societies. Perhaps the most widespread and commonly recognized examples of such technological potential have coincided with the advancement and broadening utilization of artificial intelligence (AI).
Over the last few decades, the concept of broadened integrations of AI into more commercial markets has served as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, its potential capabilities to streamline existing systems and processes has only been scratching the surface; on the other, however, these advancements have simultaneously heightened both public and private skepticism and criticism over the potential risks and complications that will coincide with the benefits AI-centric technology could offer in changing the today’s ever-evolving digital world.
To fight these stigmas surrounding AI and the technology that utilizes it, many industry professionals such as software developers, programmers, and computer science experts have begun initiatives to better educate society on how investing in AI could improve rather than harm — society. One such professional is Dr. Jason Mars who is a computer scientist, author, and entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to training others on the topics of AI, large-scale and small-scale computing, and programming languages.
Amongst his numerous contributions, Dr. Mars has helped to pioneer award-winning work on the AI system Lucida, formerly known as “Sirius:” an independent personal assistant (IPA) software that served to facilitate extensive research into future AI programs and platforms that can handle the extensive workloads which Cloud platforms requiring integrated machine learning depend on.
Upon rebranding Sirius as Lucida, Dr. Mars aimed to go beyond what Sirius’ AI had achieved, evolving it into the next generation of more intelligent AI speech recognition, imaging matching, and natural language processing systems with modularity extensibility in mind. This evolution has allowed Lucida to integrate components of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software, Image Matching (IMM), and Question-Answering systems (QAs), which can be modified or entirely replaced by custom made components.
Jason Mars says “Lucida receives queries in the form of voice speech or a digital image, and responds to those queries in the form of natural language. For example, if I ask Lucida, ‘who wrote the ‘James Bond’ books, it will respond ‘Ian Flemming’ in its AI-generated voice.”
Dr. Mars has also founded a number of companies, the most recent of which is Clinc: a record-breaking cutting-edge AI company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was here where Dr. Mars led the development of the world’s most advanced conversational AI. Focusing first on applying the technology in the banking industry, Clinc created a novel, customizable, voice-activated AI assistant and platform that connects humans with their financial stories.
From there, Dr. Mars led the company’s technology to address pressing challenges in Healthcare, Automotive, and Food Service industries. Under his technical vision and business leadership as CEO from 2015 to 2020, Clinc has experienced substantial year-over-year growth employing 120 employees, raising over $62 million in venture capital investments, and growing the business to roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with over 7 million active users. In his service as Clinc’s CEO, Dr. Mars was named Bank Innovations #2 “Most Innovative CEO in Banking” in 2017 and as #4 for Top 11 Technologists in Voice AI in 2019.
Alongside these accomplishments, Jason Mars is also the bestselling author of the book Breaking Bots: Inventing A New Voice In The AI Revolution, in which he expresses controversial insights on the incredible progress in AI and what the future holds for it while likewise deconstructing the DNA that underlies true AI innovation and disruption.
“The book also serves to inspire aspiring leaders to build something that can change the world,” Dr. Mars says, “and even tells my own personal story of comeuppance.”
As an award-winning entrepreneur and computer scientist who has devoted his career to solving complex real-world problems, building some of the world’s most sophisticated scalable systems for AI, computer vision, and natural language processing, Dr. Mars’s work has also been recognized by Crain’s Detroit Business’ 2019 40 under 40 for his “career accomplishments, impact in [his] field and contributions to [his] community.”
Dr. Mars’s work constructing large-scale A.I. and deep learning-based systems and technology has been recognized globally and continues to have a significant impact on industry and academia. Jason holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UVA. To learn more about Dr. Mars, his accomplishments, or to order his bestselling book, visit www.jasonmars.org today.
