Douglas Lenat, American researcher in artificial intelligence and founder and CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas.
Douglas Bruce Lenat (born 1950) is an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist, best known for his work on the Cyc project, an attempt to build an artificial intelligence with human-level general intelligence.
Lenat received his B.S. in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1972, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1976. His doctoral dissertation, AM: An Artificial Intelligence Model, described a program that could solve geometry problems by reasoning about the physical world.
After completing his doctorate, Lenat worked as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI International). In 1984, he founded the company Cycorp to commercialize the Cyc project.
Lenat has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
In 2016, Lenat received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence.
