<h1><span class="h3">Babak Hodjat</span></h1> <h5>Chief Technology Officer, Artificial Intelligence</h5>
<p>Babak Hodjat leads AI Research Labs, a team of developers and researchers that is advancing the state of the art in AI, building differentiated AI features in Cognizant’s offerings and leading the company’s AI for good initiatives. </p> <p>Babak is the former cofounder and CEO of Sentient, responsible for the core technology behind the world’s largest distributed AI system. Babak was also the founder of the world's first AI-driven hedge-fund, Sentient Investment Management. </p> <p>Babak is a serial entrepreneur, having started a number of Silicon Valley companies as the main inventor and technologist. Prior to cofounding Sentient, Babak was the senior director of engineering at Sybase iAnywhere, where he led mobile solutions engineering. Prior to Sybase, Babak was the cofounder, CTO and board member of Dejima Inc. 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. </p> <p>Babak has published more than 50 papers in the fields of artificial life, agent-oriented software engineering and distributed artificial intelligence, and has 39 issued US patents to his name. He is an expert in numerous fields of AI, including natural language processing, machine learning, evolutionary algorithms and distributed AI. </p> <p>Babak holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Kyushu University, in Fukuoka, Japan.</p>