Boris Katz

Boris Katz is a principal research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he heads the InfoLab Group. He is also a principal investigator at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, where he co-leads the Visual Intelligence Thrust and Technology and Knowledge Transfer. His research interests include natural language understanding and generation, multimodal information access, knowledge representation, human computer interaction, and event recognition. He has filed seven U.S. patents, including for a method of natural language annotations which retrieves multimedia information in response to everyday language queries. Katz contributed several ideas that IBM incorporated into Watson, which became the world champion at Jeopardy! in 2011. Technology created in Katz's InfoLab Group helped inspire the development of Apple's personal assistant, Siri.