Benjamin Grosof, PhD

Benjamin Grosof is co-founder and chief scientist at Coherent Knowledge, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that provides highly explainable decision support via query answering.

Benjamin is an industry leader in the theory and practice of how to represent, reason with, and acquire, knowledge, including how to combine logical knowledge representation and reasoning with machine learning and natural language. He has pioneered technology and industry standards for expressively flexible semantic rules combined with ontologies and knowledge graphs, their acquisition from natural language, and a wide variety of applications including in finance, legal and policy, e-commerce, health care and life science, defense and security, and helpdesk. In particular, he has led invention of declarative logic programs that extend databases scalably with powerful implications and meta-logic features such as probabilities, higher-order syntax, bounded rationality (restraint), and exceptions/argumentation (defeasibility).

Previously, he was a technical/research executive in AI at the Allen Institute for AI’s predecessor; Accenture; and Kyndi, a venture-backed AI startup. Earlier, he was a MIT Sloan professor in information technology, and an IBM Research scientist. His background includes a part-time expert consulting practice, PhD in computer science (specialty AI) from Stanford University, 60+ refereed publications, four patents, and five major industry software products.