In June 2002, Ron Brachman was named Director of the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  He is on IPA rotation from the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), where he was Special Assistant to the President.  Prior to joining CNRI, Dr. Brachman was the Communications Services Research Vice President at AT&T Labs.  His laboratory, which he led for the first six years of the existence of AT&T Labs, performed research in IP communications services and supporting technologies, including unified messaging, CTI applications, information navigation and retrieval, natural language understanding and generation, online platforms, artificial intelligence and machine learning, human/computer interfaces, and customer decision modeling.  The lab was responsible for a host of deployed AT&T offerings in the area of messaging, including a “universal message access” capability used in all AT&T business units and a web-based email capability used by almost 3 million customers.

Dr. Brachman has personally had a long and visible research career in the international Artificial Intelligence community, especially in the area of Knowledge Representation.  He received the B.S.E.E. degree from Princeton University (1971), and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University (1972, 1977).  After graduation he worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. and subsequently at the Fairchild/Schlumberger Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research.

Prior to joining AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1985, Dr. Brachman was instrumental in the design and implementation of several well-known knowledge representation systems and his work formed the basis for an entire subfield of research in AI (Description Logics).  His more recent work involved the development of the CLASSIC knowledge representation system and its application to problems like configuration; the PROSE configurators, based on CLASSIC, processed more than $5B in equipment orders.  He has also been active in the international data mining community, and has worked on applications of AI to knowledge discovery in databases.  An NCR product (the Management Discovery Tool) was based on his team’s work.

Dr. Brachman has been Program Chair of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1984), and has won a Best Paper prize.  He was Vice Chair of ACM SIGART for six years.  He is the co-editor of several books and editor of a book series.  He helped create a series of International Conferences on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and served as Program co-chair for the first conference (KR’89).  He served as Secretary-Treasurer for the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence from 1993 to 2002.  He was recently elected President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence; he will serve as President-Elect until 2003, at which point he begins a two-year term as President.  He was elected a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence in 1990, and was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999.

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Cognitive Systems: Human Cognitive Models in System Design Workshop
Site last updated: 03/24/2003
Contact information: Michael Bernard