Ronald Jay "Ron" Brachman (born 1949) is the director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at

Cornell Tech Cornell Tech is a graduate campus and research center of Cornell University on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, New York City. It provides courses in technology, business, and design, and includes the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, a partners ...

. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

and head of Yahoo! Labs (Now Yahoo! Research). Prior to that, he was the Associate Head of Yahoo! Labs and Head of Worldwide Labs and Research Operations.

Education

Brachman earned his B.S.E.E. degree from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

Career

Prior to working at Yahoo!, Brachman worked at

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

as the Director of the

Information Processing Techniques Office The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research",Lyon, Matthew; Hafner, Katie (1999-08-19). ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'' (p. 39). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. was par ...

(IPTO), one of DARPA's eight offices at the time. While at IPTO, he helped develop

's Cognitive Systems research efforts. Before that, he worked at

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...

(

Murray Hill, New Jersey Murray Hill is an unincorporated community located within portions of both Berkeley Heights and New Providence, located in Union County, in the northern portion of the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is the longtime central location of Bell ...

) as the Head of the

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Principles Research Department (2004) and Director of the Software and Systems Research Laboratory. When AT&T split with

Lucent Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies busines ...

in 1996, he became Communications Services Research Vice President and was one of the founders of

AT&T Labs AT&T Labs, Inc. (formerly AT&T Laboratories, Inc.) is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster, New Jersey; Middletown Township, New J ...

. He is considered by some to be the godfather of

description logic Description logics (DL) are a family of formal knowledge representation languages. Many DLs are more expressive than propositional logic but less expressive than first-order logic. In contrast to the latter, the core reasoning problems for DLs are ...

, the logic-based

knowledge representation Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...

formalism underlying the

Web Ontology Language The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of Knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge representation languages for authoring Ontology (information science), ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe Taxonomy, taxonomies and ...

OWL. He was elected a Fellow of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international Learned society, scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public under ...

in 1990. He was a resident of

Westfield, New Jersey Westfield is a Town (New Jersey), town in Union County, New Jersey, Union County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, located southwest of Manhattan. As of the 2020 United States census, the town's population was 31,032, an increase of 716 (+2.4% ...

Publications

He is the co-author with Hector Levesque of a popular book on

knowledge representation and reasoning Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...

and many scientific papers.Ronald J. Brachman (1983) "What IS-A is and isn't. An Analysis of Taxonomic Links in

Semantic Networks A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, ...

"; ''IEEE Computer'', 16 (10); October.

References

External links

External biography
Living people American artificial intelligence researchers Knowledge representation Harvard University alumni Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni Cornell Tech faculty Fellows of the IEEE Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Yahoo! employees 1959 births Presidents of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence {{compu-bio-stub