Adam Paulisick
Distinguished Service Professor
School of Computer Science
Lead Instructor
Adam is the CEO of SkillyAI (formerly SkillBuilder.io), the company turning the web into a personal concierge by chaining together “Skillies” - site-specific AI agents that talk to each other so users never bounce from tab to tab again. Adam forged this vision through four years of research at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a Distinguished Service Professor focused on entrepreneurship, AI, and human-computer interaction. Before academia, he scaled products and teams as Chief Product Officer at the Boston Consulting Group post the acquisition of MAYA Design and as a Senior Vice President at Nielsen post the acquisition of BuzzMetrics. When not running corporate retreats on his farmette Adam regularly contributes to his open source lab: maadlabs.io.
To connect with Adam:
www.linkedin.com/in/paulisick/
Sean Ammirati
Distinguished Service Professor
Tepper School of Business
Instructor
Sean is a Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and the Co-Founder and former Director of the Carnegie Mellon Corporate Startup Lab (CSL). Through CSL, he developed tools and courses to help corporations integrate entrepreneurial practices and partnered graduate students with companies to test startup ideas. Beyond academia, Sean is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and author with a track record of leading seed investments in 20 companies, including NoWait (acquired by Yelp) and JazzHR (acquired by Jobvite). He also founded and sold multiple ventures, including mSpoke, LinkedIn’s first acquisition. His book, The Science of Growth (2016), was released by St. Martin's Press in April 2016 and was subsequently translated and published in Korean and Mandarin.
Dave Mawhinney
Full Teaching Professor
Tepper School of Business
Instructor
Dave Mawhinney is the founding Executive Director, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, and executive director, Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship. Dave is also full teaching professor at the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Dave was co-founder, chairman and CEO of mSpoke, an internet content and advertising recommendation engine, that was acquired in 2010 by LinkedIn. In 2006, Morgan Stanley’s MSCI/Barra business unit acquired mSpoke’s first business line, a quantitative investment recommendation engine. Earlier in his career, he co-founded three successful startup ventures, including Premier Health Exchange (acquired by Medibuy), Hawk Medical (acquired by McKesson), and Industry.Net (merged with AT&T Business Network to form Nets, Inc.). Dave holds an MBA with Distinction from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in physics, Summa Cum Laude, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Bain McHale
Teaching Assistant - 2025 Cohort
Bain was a Master's of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation student who helped transform AI//VS from an experiment into arguably the largest incubator in SW PA. While we'll miss Bain who is now with Databricks his founding TA contributions from the website to the heroic demo day management will continue to compound into decades of impact. With Bain's support the 25 Cohort had several McGinnis Venture Competition winners, a Hult Prize global finalist, companies selected by Y Combinator, multiple companies who completed priced venture rounds, and teams accepted into competitive programs such as the NVIDIA Accelerator and Hustle Fund’s Emerging Founder School BY demo day.
Want quick answers about Swartz? Chat with their AI Winnie. Thanks to the support of the Founding Executive Director Dave Mawhinney, the Swartz Center serves as a catalyst for the startup success of our students. They provide robust educational programs, including CONNECTs Workshops, and the opportunity to participate in key initiatives like the McGinnis Venture Competition, an annual business pitch contest, or the VentureBridge Accelerator, a program for CMU alumni founders. Our mentor network, featuring over 400 experts, offers guidance to navigate startup challenges.
Partner resources include Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub (up to $150K in Azure credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits), AWS credits ($5,000 to $25,000), and Google Cloud credits (up to $100,000). Additional tools like discounted HubSpot CRM, the 99 Tartans investment group, and the CMU Tech and Entrepreneurship Community offer further support. Legal and professional services are available through partnerships with Pillsbury, Dentons, and Goodwin Procter, along with equity management discounts via Carta.
The Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon educates the leaders of tomorrow and performs groundbreaking research in the areas of:
Natural Language Processing | Computational Linguistics | Information Extraction | Summarization & Question Answering | Information Retrieval | Text Mining & Analytics | Knowledge Representation | Reasoning & Acquisition | Language Technologies for Education | Machine Learning | Machine Translation | Multimodal Computing and Interaction | Speech Processing | Spoken Interfaces & Dialogue Processing
Shoutout to Dr. Michael Shamos. The Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Innovation (MSAII) program combines a rigorous AI and machine learning curriculum with real-world team experience in innovation and entrepreneurship.