Boris Katz

Boris Katz
Born	October 5th, 1947 Kishinev, Moldavian SSR, Soviet Union
Alma mater	Moscow State University
Known for	START
Scientific career
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	MIT

Boris Katz, born in Kishinev, Moldavian SSR, Soviet Union (now Chișinău, Moldova) is a principal research scientist (computer scientist) at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and head of the Laboratory's InfoLab Group. His research interests include natural language processing and understanding, machine learning and intelligent information access. His brother Victor Kac is a mathematician at MIT.

He was able to get out of the USSR with the help of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, before the end of the cold war.^[1]

Over the last several decades,^[2] Boris Katz has been developing the START natural language system that allows the user to access various types of information using English.

Past works

• A Knowledge Entry System for Subject Matter Experts: The goal of SHAKEN project is to enable subject matter experts, without any assistance from AI technologists, to assemble the models of processes and mechanisms so that questions about them can be answered by declarative inference and simulation.^[3]
• Exploiting lexical regularities in designing natural language systems
• Word sense disambiguation for information retrieval
• HIKE (HPKB integrated knowledge environment)- a query interface and integrated knowledge environment for HPKB
• Quantitative evaluation of passage retrieval algorithms for question answering
• Sticky notes for the semantic web
• Question answering from the web using knowledge annotation and knowledge mining techniques
• The role of context in question answering systems

References

External links

• Boris Katz Web Page
• Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology