Boris Katz is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he directs the InfoLab Group. According to his MIT homepage, his research spans natural language understanding and generation, intelligent information access, knowledge representation, and human-computer interaction, all aimed at letting people get information by asking questions in everyday language.
His best-known creation is START, which his page describes as “the first question-answering system on the Web,” connected to the web in 1993 and answering millions of questions since. He also invented and patented the method of natural language annotation, in which information is tagged with English descriptions so that a system can match a user’s plain-language question to the right answer across text, images, video, and audio. An earlier version of the system was even used at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the 1989 Voyager Neptune encounter to help journalists ask questions about the spacecraft.
Katz’s page notes that his work contributed technical ideas to IBM’s Watson and that his InfoLab technology influenced the development of Apple’s Siri, placing him upstream of two of the most visible question-answering and assistant systems of the modern era.
For a general reader, Katz is a connecting figure in the conversational-AI story: the researcher who, decades before voice assistants, was already building systems whose whole purpose was to take a question in human language and hand back a direct answer.