Babak Hodjat

Vice President of Evolutionary AI, Cognizant

Babak Hodjat is the Vice President of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant. Prior to Cognizant, he was chief scientist and co-founder of Sentient Technologies, responsible for the core technology behind the world’s largest distributed evolutionary system. Babak is an entrepreneur having started a number of Silicon Valley companies as main inventor and technologist. He was senior director of engineering at Sybase iAnywhere, where he led Mobile Solutions Engineering including the AvantGo Platform, and the mBusiness Anywhere and Answers Anywhere product suites. Previously, Babak was the co-founder, CTO and board member of Dejima Inc, acquired by Sybase in April 2004. Babak is the primary inventor of Dejima's patented agent-oriented technology applied to intelligent interfaces for mobile and enterprise computing – the technology behind Apple’s Siri. Dejima was one of only four private firms enrolled in the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)-funded Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Observes (CALO) Project, managed by SRI International and one of the largest AI projects ever funded. Babak served as the acting CEO of Dejima for 9 months from October 2000. In his past experience, he led several large computer networking and machine learning projects at Neda, Inc.

Babak received his PhD in Machine Intelligence from Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. Babak is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the AI XPRIZE, as well as several other companies including Affectiva, and Predii.