Babak Hodjat is Vice President of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant, and former co-founder and CEO of Sentient. He is responsible for the core technology behind the world’s largest distributed artificial intelligence system. Hodjat was also the founder of the world's first AI-driven hedge fund, Sentient Investment Management. He is a serial entrepreneur, having started a number of Silicon Valley companies as main inventor and technologist.

Prior to co-founding Sentient, Hodjat was senior director of engineering at Sybase iAnywhere, where he led mobile solutions engineering. He was also co-founder, CTO and board member of Dejima Inc. Hodjat 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.

A published scholar in the fields of artificial life, agent-oriented software engineering and distributed artificial intelligence, Hodjat has 31 granted or pending patents to his name. He is an expert in numerous fields of AI, including natural language processing, machine learning, genetic algorithms and distributed AI and has founded multiple companies in these areas. Hodjat holds a Ph.D. in machine intelligence from Kyushu University, in Fukuoka, Japan.

Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, Futurism, Innovation, Technology, Information Technology, Entrepreneurship, Computer Science, Software Development, Software, Data, Databases & Infrastructure, Data Analytics, Future Of Work, Technology Futurism