Bio

Leora Morgenstern received her B.A. summa cum laude in mathematics and philosophy from the City College of New York, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, in 1988. She was an assistant professor at Brown University from 1987 to 1989 before joining the research staff at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. For the past 19 years, Dr. Morgenstern has pursued her foundational research in Artificial Intelligence at the same time as she has extended state-of-the-art knowledge representation techniques for industrial applications. She is noted in particular for her contributions in applying her research in semantic networks, nonmonotonic inheritance networks, and business rules for applications in knowledge management, customer relationship management, and decision support. These applications have been deployed by Fortune-500 companies in various industries, and have been demonstrated to increase company income stream by significant percentages.

Dr. Morgenstern is the author of over forty scholarly publications and holds three patents. Her patents have won several IBM awards due to their value to industry. Dr. Morgenstern is on the editorial boards of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, and Electronic Transactions of Artificial Intelligence. She has co-edited special issues of Artificial Intelligence and Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. She has served as chair of IBM Research's AI Professional Interest Community, and as co-chair of the Bar-Ilan Symposium on Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Together with John McCarthy and Vladimir Lifschitz, she founded the biannual Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning in 1991, and has twice served as co-chair of this symposium. She developed and continues to maintain the Commonsense Problem Page, a website devoted to the pursuit of research in formal commonsense reasoning.