Doug Lenat

Douglas B. Lenat is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, the company he founded in 1994 to carry on the development and commercialization of the Cyc technology he initiated. He has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, knowledge representation, blackboard systems, and ontological engineering. He has also worked in military simulations and published a critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism based on his experience with Eurisko.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Lenat received his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Physics, and his Master's degree in applied mathematics in 1972. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford in 1976. His Ph.D. thesis was a heuristic program called AM that made hundreds of small creative discoveries in mathematics -- a theorem proposer, rather than a theorem prover -- for which he was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers & Thought Award in 1977.

Dr. Lenat was named one of the original Fellows of the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence). He is a prolific author, and has been a professor at CMU and Stanford, a founder of Teknowledge, and have served on the technical advisory boards of both Apple and Microsoft. His interest and experience in national security has led him to regularly consult for U.S. government agencies and the White House. From 1984 through 1994, Dr. Lenat directed the Cyc common sense knowledge base and reasoning project for MCC, the USA's first high-technology research consortium.

Sources: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Lenat & http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/030604.html

See:

• Dr. Lenat's Ontolog invited speaker presentation entitled: "CYC: Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineering" at ConferenceCall_2005_11_17
• Dr. Lenat's presentation at the UpperOntologySummit face-to-face meetings:
  • at the 2008.03.14 preparation meeting
  • on 2008.03.15 on The value of formal, upper ontologies, and
  • on (2008.03.15) [[UpperOntologySummitMeeting_2006_03_15|OpenCyc and his position at the UpperOntologySummit]]
• Dr. Lenat's briefing at the 2008.04.03 Joint OpenOntologyRepository-OntologySummit2008 Panel Discussion - see: ConferenceCall_2008_04_03