Vanguard Award
“Jason Mars’ work is at the intersection of science, technology, and entrepreneurship with the mission to have meaningful impact in the lives of every human. This commitment is demonstrated by a long list of intellectual and technical contributions.
Jason is a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan where he directs Clarity Lab, one of the best places in the world to be trained in topics spanning artificial intelligence, large scale computing, and programming languages. Among numerous contributions, his lab pioneered award winning work on Sirius (aka Lucida) the world’s first open source sophisticated virtual assistant that simultaneously hears, sees, and understands.Jason Mars also founded a number of companies including Clinc, a record breaking cutting-edge A.I. company based in Ann Arbor Michigan where he lead the development of the world’s most advanced conversational AI. Focusing first on applying the technology in banking industry, Clinc created a novel, customizable, voice-activated AI assistant and platform that connects humans with their financial stories. From there, Jason lead 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 experienced substantial year over year growth employing 120 employees, raising over 62 million of venture capital dollars, and growing the business to around 10m ARR with over 7 million active users. In his service as CEO he was named Bank Innovations #2 Most Innovative CEO in Banking 2017. and #4 in Top 11 Technologists in Voice AI 2019.
Jason Mars is also the bestselling author of “Breaking Bots: Inventing A New Voice In The AI Revolution” where he expresses controversial insights on the surprising progress in AI and what the future holds while 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 and tells Jason’s personal story of comeuppance. Jason has devoted his career to solving difficult real-world problems, building some of the worlds most sophisticated scalable systems for A.I., computer vision, and natural language processing. This work has been recognized by Crain’s Detroit Business’ 2019 40 under 40 for “career accomplishments, impact in their field and contributions to their community.” Prior to University of Michigan, Jason was a professor at UCSD where he made a number of key contributions in Cloud Computing. He also worked at Google and Intel.
Jason’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 PhD in Computer Science from UVA.”