Matthew Lease is an associate professor in the School of Information at UT Austin and a senior faculty research associate for the Center for Media Engagement. He received his Computer Science Ph.D. from Brown University and his B.Sc. from the University of Washington. His research on artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and crowdsourcing has been recognized by three Early Career awards: from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences. Additional honors include best paper awards at the 2019 European Conference for Information Retrieval, the 2016 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Human Computation and Crowdsourcing conference, and the Modeling Challenge Award at the 2012 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction. From 2010-2013, Lease ran benchmarking challenges for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). Lease’s industry experience includes Intel Research, a computer game company, an image compression startup, and a crowdsourcing startup. His work has been funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Moody College of Communication, and The University of Texas at Austin.