Anna Huang, MuCoaCo alum, joins
MIT's departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Music and Theater Arts as an assistant professor in September 2024 after eight years with Google Brain and DeepMind where she spearheaded efforts in generative modelling and reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction in support of human-AI musical partnerships. Anna is creator of Music Transformer and Coconet, which powered the Bach Google Doodle. She holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila. Anna holds a BM in music composition and BS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an SM from MIT, and a PhD from Harvard University.
At MIT, Anna is collaborating with Eran Egozy to devlop and launch
MIT's new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program at the intersection of music, computing, and technology. The program comprises of two two-semester master's degrees – a thesis-based Master of Science program available only to MIT undergraduates, and a coursework-based Master of Applied Science open to all students – and a PhD in MIT's School of Engineering.
“As a composer turned AI researcher who specializes in generative music technology, my long-term goal is to develop AI systems that can shed new light on how we understand, learn, and create music, and to learn from interactions between musicians in order to transform how we approach human-AI collaboration,” says Huang. “This new program will let us further investigate how musical applications can illuminate problems in understanding neural networks, for example.”
