Leora Morgenstern

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Commonsense Problem Page
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Welcome!


who
Dr. Leora Morgenstern is Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY, developing leading technologies in the areas of decision support, knowledge management, customer relationship management, business rules, and the semantic web.

what
For the past 15 years, Dr. Morgenstern's research has focused on extending state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and formal knowledge representation techniques for commercial and real-world applications. She is best known for:

  • her development of extensions of nomonotonic inheritance networks for decision systems for benefits inquiry in medical insurance
  • her development of enhanced semantic networks, an expressive form of semantic network that supports provably sound and efficient reasoning, and that has been used in banking recommendation systems and call center support tools.
  • her construction of expressive yet compact business models that support efficient reasoning

Dr. Morgenstern has served as technical lead for developing and deploying applications for Fortune-500 companies in a diversity of industries, including medical insurance, banking, insurance, telephony, software sales, and business continuity. These applications include:

  • decision systems for benefits inquiry in medical insurance
  • recommendations systems for banking products and services
  • support tools for sales representives in call centers
  • decision systems for financial planning
  • dynamic configuration of financial instruments
  • rapid search of corporate intranets
  • systems for dynamic dialogue

what else
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 has served as senior program committee member and program committee member of major AI conferences such as AAAI, KR, and IJCAI.

Her basic research interests include:

  • Ontologies
  • Semantic Networks
  • Formal commonsense reasoning. See the Commonsense Problem Page.
  • Reasoning about knowledge and belief
  • Reasoning about time
  • Multi-agent planning
  • Nonmonotonic temporal planning
  • Multi-agent nonmonotonic reasoning

where
leora @ steam. stanford.edu (for most email)
leora @ us. ibm.com (only for email directly related to IBM business)