Dr. Alan Cowen, PhD

Alan Cowen is Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Scientist at Hume AI.

Most recently, he founded Hume AI in 2021 to advance emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence—such as its flagship Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) and OCTAVE systems. Alan has built Hume from the ground up around a research-first ethos, marrying emotion science with scalable product development. Prior to Hume, he led the Affective Computing team at Google, and served as a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Social Interaction Lab, authoring more than 40 peer‑reviewed publications in top-tier journals like Nature, PNAS, Science Advances, and Nature Human Behavior.

Alan was originally trained as an applied mathematician with a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.