Boris Katz



Boris Katz is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and head of the Laboratory's InfoLab Group (see our Publications). His research interests include natural language generation and understanding, intelligent information access, knowledge representation, human computer interaction, and event recognition. Boris Katz is the creator of the START natural language system and the inventor of a patented method of natural language annotations, which facilitate access to multimedia information in response to questions expressed in everyday language.

In 1989 during the Voyager Neptune encounter, START was used in the JPL press room to answer reporters' questions about the Voyager 2 spacecraft. In 1993, START became the first question-answering system on the Web, and since then answered millions of questions from Web users all over the world. Click here if you want to ask START questions in English.

Boris Katz is a member of the Open Advancement of Question Answering consortium where he contributed several technical ideas incorporated into IBM's Watson system, which in 2011 defeated the all-time human champions on the quiz show Jeopardy. Technology created in Katz's InfoLab Group in 2006 (see press, technical paper and video) was a major inspiration for the development of Apple's personal assistant, Siri.

Boris is a member of the MIT–Harvard Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, where he serves as a co-leader of the Vision and Language Thrust and a coordinator for Technology and Knowledge Transfer.


Boris Katz (boris@mit.edu)
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Stata Center, 32-G430
32 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA 02139