Boris Katz (born October 5, 1947) is a principal American research scientist (

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

) at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

and head of the Laboratory's InfoLab Group. His research interests include

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

and understanding,

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and intelligent information access. His brother

Victor Kac Victor Gershevich (Grigorievich) Kac (russian: link=no, Виктор Гершевич (Григорьевич) Кац; born 19 December 1943) is a Soviet and American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory. He co-disco ...

is a mathematician at MIT. He was able to get out of the

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

with the help of U.S. Senator

Ted Kennedy Edward Moore Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. A member of the Democratic ...

, before the end of the

cold war The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

. Over the last several decades, Boris Katz has been developing the START natural language system that allows the user to access various types of

information Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random ...

using

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

Biography

Boris Katz was born on October 5, 1947, in

Chișinău Chișinău ( , , ), also known as Kishinev (russian: Кишинёв, r=Kishinjóv ), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the Republic of Moldova. The city is Moldova's main industrial and commercial center, and is located in the ...

in the family of Hersh Katz (died 1976) and Hayki (Klara) Landman (born 1921,

Lipcani Lipcani (; uk, Липкани, russian: Липканы, yi, ליפקאַן ''Lipkon'') is a town in Briceni District, Moldova. It is also a border crossing between Moldova and Romania. Overview Lipcani is located on the banks of the Prut ri ...

Briceni District Briceni () is a district ( ro, raion) in the north-west of Moldova, with the administrative center at Briceni. The other major city is Lipcani. As of January 1, 2011, its population was 75,300. History The first documentary attestation dates back ...

- died 2006,

, Middlesex County), who moved from Lipcani, a town located in the northern

Bessarabia Bessarabia (; Gagauz: ''Besarabiya''; Romanian: ''Basarabia''; Ukrainian: ''Бессара́бія'') is a historical region in Eastern Europe, bounded by the Dniester river on the east and the Prut river on the west. About two thirds of Be ...

n, to

before the war. He graduated from Moscow State University and in November 1978, he left for the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

thanks to the personal intervention of Senator

Edward M. Kennedy Edward Moore Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. A member of the Democratic ...

. He defended his thesis as a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences in 1975 under the supervision of Evgenii M. Landis. He currently lives in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

and heads the InfoLabresearch team at the Laboratory of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Boris Katz is the creator of the START information processing system (since 1993 - on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

), the author of several works in the field of processing, generation and perception of natural languages, machine learning, and accelerated access to multimedia information.

Family

Brothers - Victor Gershevich Katz, American mathematician, professor at the

; Mikhail Gershevich Katz,

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

i mathematician, graduate of

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and Columbia (Ph.D., 1984) universities, professor at Bar-Ilan University, author of the monograph "Systolic Geometry and Topology" (Mathematical Surveys and Monographs, vol. 137. American Mathematical Society:

Providence Providence often refers to: * Providentia, the divine personification of foresight in ancient Roman religion * Divine providence, divinely ordained events and outcomes in Christianity * Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of Rhode Island in the ...

, 2007). Daughter - Luba Katz, a bioinformatics scientist (her husband is Alan Jasanoff, a neuroimaging scientist, a professor at MIT, the son of

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

professors Jay Jasanoff and Sheila Jasanoff).

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.
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

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Katz, Boris 1947 births Living people Scientists from Chișinău Moldovan Jews Bessarabian Jews Soviet emigrants to the United States Computational linguistics researchers Artificial intelligence researchers Moscow State University alumni Natural language processing researchers