Leora Morgenstern

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Welcome!

who

Dr. Leora Morgenstern is Senior Scientist and Technical Fellow at Leidos Corporation (formerly Science Applications International Corporation), leading the development of innovative knowledge representation techniques for deep understanding of large corpora of text in a wide variety of domains. Her contributions in this endeavor include serving as PI of the SAIC Evaluation and Knowledge Infrastructure Team for the DARPA Machine Reading Program, which focused on developing methods to extract formal knowledge from free text; and PI of TAILCM, an IARPA sponsored seedling that has investigated the feasibility of translating regulatory text written in natural language to rules in formal logic programming languages.

Before joining SAIC, Dr. Morgensten was Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY where she developed leading technologies in the areas of decision support, knowledge management, customer relationship management, business rules, and the semantic web.

what

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 has been 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
  • Narrative Structure
  • Formal commonsense reasoning. See the Commonsense Problem Page.
  • Deep understanding of large text corpora
  • Reasoning about knowledge and belief
  • Reasoning about time
  • Multi-agent planning
  • Nonmonotonic temporal planning
  • Multi-agent nonmonotonic reasoning

where

For academic email, you can use either of the following addresses:

  • Myfirstname followed by a dot followed by Mylastname, followed by the at sign, followed by Leidos, followed by dot followed by com
  • Myfirstname followed by the at sign, followed by cs, followed by dot, followed by nyu, followed by dot, followed by edu
For Leidos business, you should of course use the Leidos email address.

Copyright 1996-2013 Leora Morgenstern, Ph.D.
Last updated December 27, 2013.