Babak Hodjat


Babak Hodjat was the co-founder and CEO of Sentient Technologies and now holds the position of Vice President of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant. He is a specialist in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Biography

Career in science

Babak Hodjat was born in 1967 in Wimbledon. He studied at 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.

Career in business

Hodjat moved to California in 1998 and founded Dejima Inc.. The firm was based on a patented adaptive agent-oriented software engineering platform developed by Hodjat, Christopher J. Savoie and Makoto Amamiya. 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.
In 2002, the company developed a voice control Natural Interaction Platform in collaboration with the Stanford University's research group Archimedes Project. During these years Hodjat continued his research on agent oriented software architecture and natural language user interfaces. In July 2003, Dejima got funding from SRI International within the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes project of DARPA and worked on a Perceptive Assistant that Learns initiative. 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.
In April 2004, Dejima was acquired by Sybase iAnywhere. Hodjat served as Senior Director of Engineering at Sybase iAnywhere from 2004 to 2008, where he developed AvantGo Platform, mBusiness Anywhere and Answers Anywhere. In 2006, he co-founded MobileVerbs Inc., a mobile marketing service company, which was acquired by iLoop Mobile in February 2010.
In 2007, he teamed with Antoine Blondeau and Adam Cheyer to establish Genetic Finance Holding Ltd..
In the following years Hodjat has worked on developing massively distributed computing technology and improving machine-learning technique known as evolutionary algorithms. One area that gained special attention from the press was applying Sentient Technologies algorithms to a stock market trading through specially created Sentient Investment Management hedge fund.
Following the management change within Sentient Technologies, Hodjat became the company's CEO in February 2017. He continues his business and educational projects.

Selected publications

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.