Susann Luperfoy

Before joining UPOP as Executive Director in 2007 Susann Luperfoy had spent most of her career as a research scientist and engineer in applied artificial intelligence. She has experience in academia, government, and industry spanning diverse organizations, from pre-IPO start-ups to mature public corporations and research labs. Her technical training and applied research centered on the domain of Artificial Intelligence, with an emphasis on knowledge representation, spoken dialog, machine translation, computational discourse, acoustic phonetics, and intelligent tutoring systems. Following postdoctoral research on interpreting telephony in Kyoto, Japan, Dr. Luperfoy taught AI and Linguistics at Georgetown University for eight years where she also guided graduate research in AI and natural language processing topics.

She has authored and edited over 30 publications, and delivered over 40 invited lectures and technical tutorials on AI research and its application. She has also organized workshops, symposia, special interest groups, and standards committees, and served on the technical boards of five Cambridge start-ups. Her board service prompted the study of some of the organizational and management challenges associated with the transition from tech-based start-up to successful commercial enterprise.

As an engineering director at Akamai, she led the growth of the department that delivered analysis and visualization tools to commercial customers and to the internal team of 24/7 network performance monitoring staff. Just prior to joining MIT full time, she developed simulation-based intelligent tutoring systems for customer domains as diverse as surgeons and surgery instructors to military combat personnel.

Dr. Luperfoy has been committed to UPOP's mission since its inception, and has observed its positive impact on students. She was one of the first recipients of the Desh and Jaishree Deshpande UPOP Service Award, which recognizes outstanding volunteer efforts. Dr. Luperfoy lives in Lexington Mass with her husband and two children.