Babak Hodjat

Babak Hodjat (; born November 1, 1967) is a British computer scientist, entrepreneur, and writer. He was the co-founder and CEO of Sentient Technologies and now holds the position of Chief Technology Officer AI at Cognizant. He is a specialist in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In 1998 Hodjat co-founded Dejima Inc and served as CEO and CTO, his patented work on artificial intelligence led to the technology used by Apple for their digital assistant Siri.

Biography Early life Babak Hodjat was born on November 1, 1967, in Wimbledon. His father was a retired university professor in entomology who worked at the British Museum. As a child, he did not like insects and would wander off to the nearby science museum, where he would spend long hours in front of a computer they had on display. He attended middle school in the United States. He studied at the Sharif University of Technology from 1986 to 1995, and received his Master of Science degree in software engineering. In 1994, together with another computer department student Hormoz Shahrzad presented their research titled Introducing a dynamic problem solving scheme based on a learning algorithm in artificial life environments at the first IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence held at Orlando.

Hodjat received a PhD in machine intelligence from Kyushu University in 2003 During his time there, he published several works on adaptive agent oriented software architecture and natural language user interfaces. Hodjat served as the CTO and as the CEO for 9 months from October 2000. By 2000 the company had offices in San Jose, London and Tokyo. During these years Hodjat continued his research on agent oriented software architecture and natural language user interfaces. Hodjat was the primary inventor of the firm's agent-oriented technology applied to intelligent interfaces for mobile and enterprise computing – a technology that eventually led to Siri. Hodjat served as senior director of engineering at Sybase iAnywhere In 2006, he co-founded MobileVerbs Inc.,

In 2007, he teamed with Antoine Blondeau (former CEO of Dejima) and Adam Cheyer (Dejima's vice president and Chief Architect of the CALO project ) to establish Genetic Finance Holding Ltd. (where he began as CTO). In 2014 the firm became Sentient Technologies. Hodjat was joined by his long-time research fellow Hormoz Shahrzad who became principal scientist,

In the following years Hodjat has worked on developing massively distributed computing technology and improving machine-learning technique known as evolutionary algorithms.

Following the management change within Sentient Technologies, Hodjat became the company's CEO in February 2017. He continues his business and educational projects (he was on the jury of IBM Watson AI XPRIZE and the Merit Awards committee for the ISAL Award).

Writing Hodjat is the author of multiple books such as The Konar and the Apple: Fun, Beauty, and Dread--From Ahwaz to California and the science fiction novel "The Narrator" (January 2022; )(March 2023; ).

Selected publications

Patents Babak Hodjat holds 21 patents in the fields of agent-oriented programming, natural language decision engines, distributed evolutionary algorithms for asset management and trading and data mining.