Doug Lenat

Dr. Douglas B. Lenat is one of the world’s leading computer scientists, founder of the Cyc project, and founder and Co-CEO of Cycorp.

Dr. Lenat has been a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University and Stanford University and has received numerous honors. These include being awarded the biennial IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, which is the highest honor in artificial intelligence; being named the first Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and being named a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Cognitive Science Society.

He has authored over one hundred publications primarily in the areas of machine learning, automatic program synthesis, knowledge-based systems, representation, and automated inference, and he is an editor of the J. Automated Reasoning, J. Learning Sciences, J. Applied Ontology, J. Applied Artificial Intelligence, and the Springer Artificial Intelligence series of books.

In addition to being a professor at CMU and Stanford, he was Principal Scientist at MCC, where he founded the Cyc Project in 1984 – something he dubbed “ontological engineering”. At the end of 1994, the Cyc project spun out of MCC, becoming Cycorp, Inc., and he has served as its CEO since that time.

Dr. Lenat is a founder and Advisory Board member of TTI Vanguard, where he continues to co-run four conferences each year, and he holds the distinction of being the only individual to have served on the Scientific Advisory Board of both Microsoft and Apple. Dr. Lenat received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford, investigating automated discovery based on “interestingness” heuristics, for which he received the bi-annual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1977, and in 1980 he was one of the co-founders of AAAI and of Teknowledge.