ODSC AI West 2026
Oct 27, 2026 – Oct 29, 2026 · Hybrid · scheduled
At this event: Cognizant
Babak Hodjat, PhD
SVP, Chief AI Officer
Babak Hodjat leads the Cognizant AI Research Lab, a team of developers and researchers bringing advanced AI solutions to businesses. Babak is the former cofounder and CEO of Sentient, responsible for the core technology behind the world’s largest distributed artificial intelligence system. He was also the founder of the world's first AI-driven hedge fund, Sentient Investment Management. Babak is a serial entrepreneur, having started several Silicon Valley companies as main inventor and technologist. Prior to cofounding Sentient, Babak was senior director of engineering at Sybase iAnywhere, where he led mobile solutions engineering. Prior to Sybase, he was cofounder, CTO and board member of Dejima Inc. He 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. Babak has published many papers in the fields of artificial life, agent-oriented software engineering, and distributed artificial intelligence, and has 39 issued US patents. He is an expert in numerous fields of AI, including natural language processing, ML, genetic algorithms, distributed AI, and has founded multiple companies in these areas. Babak holds a Ph.D. in machine intelligence from Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. He is also the author of “The Narrator,” an AI sci-fi novella, and “The Konar and the Apple,” a collection of short stories based on his youth.
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