Boris Katz


Boris Katz is a principal American research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and head of the Laboratory's InfoLab Group. His research interests include natural language processing and understanding, machine learning and intelligent information access. His brother Victor Kac is a mathematician at MIT.
He was able to get out of the USSR with the help of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, before the end of the cold war.
Over the last several decades, Boris Katz has been developing the START natural language system that allows the user to access various types of information using English.

Biography

Boris Katz was born on October 5, 1947, in Chișinău in the family of Hersh Katz and Hayki Landman, who moved from Lipcani, a town located in the northern Bessarabian to Chișinău before the war. He graduated from Moscow State University and in November 1978, he left for the United States thanks to the personal intervention of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He defended his thesis as a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences in 1975 under the supervision of Evgenii M. Landis.
He currently lives in Boston and heads the InfoLabresearch team at the Laboratory of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Boris Katz is the creator of the START information processing system, the author of several works in the field of processing, generation and perception of natural languages, machine learning, and accelerated access to multimedia information.

Family

Brothers - Victor Gershevich Katz, American mathematician, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mikhail Gershevich Katz, Israeli mathematician, graduate of Harvard and Columbia universities, professor at Bar-Ilan University, author of the monograph "Systolic Geometry and Topology".
Daughter - Luba Katz, a bioinformatics scientist.

Past works