Adam Cheyer, one of the experts on the future in UCLA’s Optimist video series, was named an “outstanding master’s student” while at UCLA. That’s like saying Thomas Edison was pretty smart. Cheyer is a pivotal figure in cutting-edge artificial intelligence research, a co-founder of Siri, Inc. and program director in SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center, where he served as chief architect of the CALO project (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), one of the largest government-sponsored AI and machine learning projects in U.S. history. Today, he is co-founder and vice president of engineering at Viv Labs, a startup dedicated to providing the world with “an intelligent interface to everything.” But while he appreciates that “AI is being applied to all sorts of tangibly useful tasks,” Cheyer says, “I particularly like it when AI is applied to creative or artistic domains, which to me, gets to the heart of what makes humans human.”