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

Cornell Tech Cornell Tech is a technology, business, law, and design campus of Cornell University located on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, New York City. It includes the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, a joint academic venture between Cornell and the Tec ...

. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of Yahoo! and head of

Yahoo! Labs Yahoo! Labs served as Yahoo!'s research arm, aiming to develop research in technologies to be used within the company. Yahoo! Labs includes approximately 200 research scientists and engineers. Yahoo! Labs is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA; it ...

. 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. A Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) or a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) is an Academic degree, academic undergraduate degree awarded to a student after three to five years of studying engineering at an accredited college or university. In ...

degree from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

, and his S.M. and

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

degrees from

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 highe ...

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 A ...

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. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

(

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 northern New Jersey, United States. It is the longtime central location of Bell Labs (part of Nokia s ...

) as the Head of the

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

Principles Research Department (2004) and Director of the Software and Systems Research Laboratory. When AT&T split with Lucent in 1996, he became Communications Services Research Vice President and was one of the founders of

AT&T Labs AT&T Labs is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster NJ; Middletown, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Warrenville, IL; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX; Atl ...

. He is considered by some to be the godfather of Description Logic, the logic-based

knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...

formalism Formalism may refer to: * Form (disambiguation) * Formal (disambiguation) * Legal formalism, legal positivist view that the substantive justice of a law is a question for the legislature rather than the judiciary * Formalism (linguistics) * Scien ...

underlying the

Web Ontology Language The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for vario ...

OWL.] He was a resident of Westfield, NJ.

Publications

He is the co-author with

Hector Levesque Hector Joseph Levesque (born 1951) is a Canadian academic and researcher in artificial intelligence. His research concerns incorporating commonsense reasoning in intelligent systems and he initiated the Winograd Schemas Challenge. Education He r ...

of a popular book on

knowledge representation and reasoning Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...

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 Artificial intelligence researchers Knowledge representation Harvard University alumni Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni Cornell Tech faculty Fellow Members 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