Benjamin Grosof's OLD IBM biography (NB: as of May 2000, not current!!)
Up to my home page (NB: I'm now a MIT professor)
Dr. Benjamin Grosof is a senior research scientist, in computer
software, at IBM T.J. Watson
Research Center. He leads the Business Rules for Electronic Commerce
project. The project has been developing new fundamental techniques for
business rules interoperability, including an XML interlingua, and for
conflict handling. The project has also been developing
pilot applications for these fundamental techniques: in
catalogs & storefronts, negotiations, security authorization &
trust management, and finance. As part of this, he leads a
major portion of the $29 Million EECOMS NIST match-funded ATP project,
a 3-year industry consortium project in intelligent agent-based manufacturing
supply chain integration, led by IBM, also including Baan, Boeing, TRW,
several universities, and some smaller companies.
His areas of expertise include, more broadly, the practice and theory
of intelligent agents, especially for large-scale electronic commerce,
as well as fundamentals of reasoning and learning. He led research
design, productization, and application piloting of IBM's Agent
Building Environment (in release 1996-98), a pioneering effort in practical
intelligent agents including for mail, news, customer service, and
manufacturing workflow. He has been at IBM Research since 1988,
working primarily on the intersection of knowledge representation and
software engineering.
Summary:
Areas of expertise include: intelligent agents,
electronic commerce, business rules, and conflict handling for rules,
as well as fundamentals of reasoning and learning.
Leads effort in business rules for electronic commerce, including
new fundamental techniques in business rules interoperability and conflict
handling, exploring several pilot applications including supply chains.
Has pioneered practical intelligent agents.
Led research design and productization of IBM's Agent Building Environment
(in release 1996-98), as well as piloting of its applications.
More details:
While at IBM Watson as senior research computer scientist since 1988:
-
Business Rules for E-Commerce
project (1997 until present; this grew out of the
Intelligent Agents
project)
He leads the Business Rules for Electronic Commerce
project, which has been developing:
-
new fundamental techniques for
business rules interoperability and conflict handling -- including an
XML interlingua; and
- pilot applications for these
business rules techniques in intelligent agents and e-commerce, especially:
catalogs & storefronts, negotiations, security authorization &
trust management, and finance.
As part of this project, he leads a
-
major portion (including the IBM Research portion and additional aspects)
of the $29 Million EECOMS
NIST match-funded ATP project,
a 3-year industry consortium project (1998-2001)
in intelligent agent-based manufacturing
supply chain integration, led by IBM, also including Baan, Boeing, TRW,
several universities, and some smaller companies.
-
Information Economies
project (1997 half-time, plus fraction of time until present;
this in part grew out of the
Intelligent Agents
project)
(Information Economies (IE) are economies in which information goods
and services are created and exchanged automatically, esp. on Internet
via intelligent agents.)
Defined and analyzed emergent market phenomena of large-scale IE simulations,
including
efficiency, broker niche specialization, and price wars.
Related economic analysis to classic information-retrieval issues.
-
Intelligent Agents
project (1994 to 1997;
this grew into several projects including the above).
(Embeddable Intelligent Agents for Networked Applications,
including Internet)
Personally focused especially on:
- Company-wide strategy and evangelism, including
presentations to executives and IBM clients.
- Core invention and software design, esp. for RAISE and Agent Building
Environment (ABE).
- Reasoning, including learning. How to embed reasoning tightly
into applications. User interface fundamentals for user authoring of
rule sets to instruct an agent. Inter-agent knowledge-level
communication, including standards. Efficient inferencing. Handling
conflicts between rules (defaults, non-monotonic reasoning).
-
Concept and prototyping of an application class for which rule-based
agent smarts are valuable: "information flow", e.g., news, mail:
filter, categorize, store, redisseminate.
- Electronic commerce and customer service applications.
See publications on RAISE, ABE, and their applications.
Also, see U.S. Patent 5,778,150 (July 7, 1998) which you can find on
U.S. patents server.
- Knowledge-based Software Engineering project (1993)
Rule-based analysis to aid code porting of major database product (DB/2).
- Reasoning Technologies project (1988 to 1993)
Created fundamental techniques to enable practical commercializations of:
- Business process design and engineering:
automating workflow and integrating multiple software applications.
- Rule-based reasoning, esp. overridable rules (defaults) with
conflict handling. (PhD thesis from Stanford was on this.)
- Data mining and machine learning.
- Probabilistic and fuzzy reasoning, decision analysis
/ risk analysis (uncertain reasoning, including Bayesian).
- Large-scale integration of rule-based reasoning,
data mining, probabilistic reasoning, and inter-agent communication.
See publications. Several results now being used in
development of Intelligent Agent technologies at IBM, including RAISE/ABE.
Life before IBM:
- Grew up in Manhattan.
- Played lots of softball; frisbee and soccer too.
- Went to Harvard University to do a BA in Applied Mathematics,
including lots of graduate-level Economics and Statistics and Decision Analysis.
- Got interested in computer stuff via computer Graphics, e.g., teaching
a course section in the Graduate School of Design.
- After graduation, still wasn't sure just how much I liked computer stuff.
- Tried it out as a computer graphics software developer in
two startup companies. Enjoyed design.
- Decided Computer Science was for me, after all.
- Went to Stanford University to do a PhD in it.
Was drawn to specialize in Artificial Intelligence.
Adviser was Nils J. Nilsson, with Michael Genesereth and
Vladimir Lifschitz helping.
Earlier papers arise from this
era.
- Moved back to Manhattan in search of love and applicability.
(And eventually found both!)
Last update: 6-4-99