Ron Brachman

Ron Brachman is an internationally known expert in Artificial Intelligence.  As Distinguished Visiting Scientist, he serves as a technical advisor for scientific programs at Schmidt Sciences.

From 2016 to 2023, Ron was the Director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University.  Prior to that, he was Chief Scientist of Yahoo and Head of Yahoo Labs, where he had responsibility for leading all of Yahoo’s science activities worldwide.  From 2002 to 2005, he was the Director of the Information Processing Technology Office at DARPA, where he helped provide $1B in support to the U.S. computer science research community and devised the “Personalized Assistant that Learns” program, gave birth to Siri.  Earlier, he held research leadership positions at AT&T Labs, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Fairchild/Schlumberger, and BBN.  

Ron has served as President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and as Board member and Treasurer of the Computing Research Association (CRA). He has won multiple awards and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE, AAAI, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  He was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service while serving at DARPA, and was recently named winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems by the Cognitive Systems Foundation.

Ron has published numerous highly-cited technical papers and co-authored an important AI textbook on knowledge representation and reasoning.  His most recent book (with Hector Levesque), Machines like Us: Toward AI with Common Sense, was published by MIT Press in May of 2022.

Ron holds a B.S.E.E. degree from Princeton University and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University.