Welcome to the personal website of …

Benjamin Grosof

AI Software Technology Innovator and Leaderphoto-Grosof-201305

Summary:

  • Industry leader in AI knowledge representation, reasoning, and acquisition — especially: expressively powerful rules and queries, with explanations of answers; probabilistic logical knowledge representation & reasoning (KRR), and semantic technology, based on extended logic programming, ontologies, and knowledge graphs; combining machine learning (ML) with KRR; and logical methods in natural language processing (NLP). Active recently also in: neural-symbolic; multi-paradigm/hybrid unsupervised ML; information extraction from text; semantic/cognitive search and associated information discovery.
  • Pioneer of key research techniques and their industry standardization. Experience as MIT professor, manager of a major research program for Paul Allen, software entrepreneur, Accenture technical executive, IBM research scientist, and startups chief scientist. Developer of applications for a wide variety of domains and tasks. Background includes Stanford PhD, Harvard BA, 9 years in software startups, 70+ refereed publications, 11,000+ citations, 8+ patents, 2 W3C standards, and 5 major industry software products led.
  • Current application interests include question/query answering, decision automation, and associated analytics, in several areas: defense and national intelligence; legal and policies, including contracts, trust, regulations, tax, and compliance; financial services and accounting/reporting; health care and biomedical, including treatment guidance and causal pathways; e-commerce and procurement; and natural language based virtual/cognitive assistants, e.g., for helpdesk and customer care.

More Details — Overall:

  • Expertise in IT Research and R&D — Science, Design, and Leadership
  • Industry leader in theory and practice of how to reason with, and acquire, logical knowledge — in AI and data querying/integration
  • Pioneer of semantic technology and industry standards for
    • rules, ontologies, their acquisition from natural language, their combination with knowledge graphs;
    • highly explainable AI, for analysis and decision support/automation;
    • their applications in finance/accounting, legal regulations/contracts, e-commerce, policies, defense intelligence analysis, security/privacy/trust, life science, and e-learning.
  • Extensive experience in
    • machine learning (ML), particularly:
      • combining KRR logical methods with ML, including via probabilistic uncertainty;
      • neuro-symbolic AI that combines neural networks (NN) (a.k.a. ‘deep learning’) with KRR and often with NLP;
      • multi-paradigm/hybrid ML that combines multiple families of ML techniques;
      • unsupervised ML, e.g., NN embeddings, eigenvector, and clustering methods for extraction of topics, concepts, and associations;
    • user interaction design;
    • other AI application areas (beyond the above), e.g., cognitive search, health care, customer care, natural language question answering, and virtual/cognitive assistants.
  • Industry impact highlights include:
    • The leading approach to interoperable ontologies in knowledge graphs and semantic web, is based largely on (Benjamin Grosof’s) technical research and community organizing leadership. This includes the widely adopted W3C OWL 2 RL industry standard, based largely on Description Logic Programs KRR.
    • The leading approach to interoperable semantic rules, including on the web, is based on largely on (Benjamin Grosof’s) technical research and community organizing leadership. This includes Semantic Web Rules Language (SWRL) and W3C Rule Interchange Format, which are both based on RuleML, i.e., (declarative) extended logic programs KRR.
    • 10,000+ citations; see Google Scholar and also ResearchGate.

Presently:

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA): Program Manager in the Defense Sciences Office. I create and manage research programs. My interests in artificial intelligence foundations include meta logic programs; scalability; deeply combining logical knowledge representation and reasoning with machine learning and natural language (e.g., neuro-symbolic); explainability and interpretability; trustworthiness and critical thinking; autonomy, and human-machine interaction. My interests in AI-enabled applications include: defense intelligence, operations, planning, and information systems integration; finance, legal and policy; e-commerce and supply chain; health care, and science.
  • Coherent Knowledge: Co-Founder and Board Member. Led company technical strategy towards neuro-symbolic AI and query answering on natural language. Coherent Knowledge is an AI software startup whose KRR inference engine product ErgoAI provides expressively powerful query answering and decision support/automation, with unsurpassed practical explainability. It commercializes a major research breakthrough (Rulelog) in KRR. It combines closely with NLP and complements ML. It shines on applications of complex knowledge in financial, legal, defense, health care, and other domains.
  • RuleML, Inc.: Co-Founder and Board Member of the influential non-profit organization that does industry standards design (the Rule Markup and Modeling Initiative) and organizes the annual international research conference on rules and reasoning (RuleML+RR; it’s had some other names in past).

Previously:

  • Kyndi, Inc.:  Chief Scientist of AI, from 2018 to 2020, at this startup with unique technology for multi-paradigm machine learning (ML) combined with natural language processing (NLP) and KRR, based on hybrid encoding of linguistic abstractions, applied to cognitive/semantic search and associated information discovery, for analysis of text-heavy enterprise information collections in financial services, health care, and government defense.
  • Accenture:   Principal Director and Research Fellow, Artificial Intelligence, from 2017 to 2018.  Technical executive for launching of an ambitious initiative on leveraging AI for business process automation across Accenture’s $8B+ Operations group, with responsibilities for strategy, design, and management.
  • Coherent Knowledge: CTO and CEO from 2013 to 2017, in addition to co-founding. Then Chief Scientist from 2020 to 2023.
  • Vulcan, Inc.:  Senior Research Program Manager in advanced AI at the asset management company of Paul G. Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), from 2007 to 2013. Headed approximately a third of the organization that was the predecessor of the Allen Institute for AI.
  • MIT Professor:  Assistant Professor in Information Technology, at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (2000-2007); and DARPA Principal Investigator there.
    • RuleML, Inc.: Co-Chair from 2000 to 2005, in addition to co-founding.
    • Benjamin Grosof & Associates: Principal of a part-time expert consulting firm founded while at MIT, that specialized in technology strategy and design, custom education, and intellectual property expert witness work, from 2000 to 2017.
  • IBM Research:  senior software scientist on AI, leading projects on intelligent agents and on business rules for e-commerce, at IBM’s main lab (in the group that later produced the IBM Watson system), from 1988 to 2000.
  • Stanford Ph.D.:   in computer science, specialty AI; full fellowships from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, NSF, and GE.
  • Harvard B.A.:  in applied mathematics, specialty economics and management science.