June 8, 2021 | Eli Freund - School of Engineering

Dori-Hacohen joining UConn School of Engineering, transitions to CSO and Chair of Board of Startup

Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen will be joining the University of Connecticut School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering Department starting August 2021 as a tenure-track assistant professor. She is currently the founder and CEO of Automated Controversy Detection, Inc. (AuCoDe), an AI-based startup that detects controversies and misinformation online and turns them into actionable intelligence. Dori-Hacohen founded AuCoDe in 2016, and the company has received over $1 million in funding from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen (Courtesy of Dori-Hacohen)

 

Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen will be joining the University of Connecticut School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering Department starting August 2021 as a tenure-track assistant professor. She is currently the founder and CEO of Automated Controversy Detection, Inc. (AuCoDe), an AI-based startup that detects controversies and misinformation online and turns them into actionable intelligence. Dori-Hacohen founded AuCoDe in 2016, and the company has received over $1 million in funding from the National Science Foundation.

Dori-Hacohen is part of a new hiring initiative by UConn called “cluster hires.” Over the next several years, UConn has committed to hiring faculty with strong backgrounds in various fields, with entrepreneurship being the first. Dori-Hacohen, in addition to excellence in her field of expertise, also demonstrated a successful track record as a startup founder and technology innovator. 

“I’m thrilled to join UConn as part of the entrepreneurship cluster hire. This new position allows me to have the best of both worlds: impacting the next generation of startup founders and expanding on my cutting edge research on controversies and disinformation at UConn, while continuing to bring that work into practice at AuCoDe,” said Dori-Hacohen.

She will be succeeded as AuCoDe’s CEO by her longtime co-founder and collaborator, Julian Lustig-Gonzalez, about whom she shared: “Julian is my trusted partner and an extremely experienced serial entrepreneur, who I’m certain will lead the company to soaring new heights, and I can’t wait to be a part of that success.”

Leadership of the technological development at AuCoDe will be spearheaded at the day-to-day level by Dr. Keen Sung, AuCoDe’s co-founder and VP of Research & Development, who has 12 years of interdisciplinary research experience in both computer science and cognitive neuroscience. Dori-Hacohen will assume the position of Chief Scientific Officer and Chair of the Board at AuCoDe, where she will continue to develop innovative solutions within the company, in parallel to her new UConn role. 

“We are ecstatic about the new collaborations and opportunities of having Shiri in such a prestigious role at UConn, and we eagerly anticipate the world-changing research on controversy and misinformation that will be developed in her lab,” said Lustig-Gonzalez, “AuCoDe has always had its roots in innovative academic research as a spin-off out of UMass. This transition will strengthen AuCoDe’s position at the forefront of translational computer science research in the disinformation space and we look forward to being a UConn faculty-affiliated company.”

For more information on the UConn Department of Computer Science and Engineering, please visit: https://www.cse.uconn.edu. For more information on AuCoDe, please visit: https://www.aucode.io/.