Dr. Babak Hodjat (born November 1, 1967, in London, England) is a British computer scientist, entrepreneur, and writer associated with Iran, the United Kingdom, and the United States, who has been active from 1984 to the present. Educated at Sharif University of Technology and Kyushu University, he is a specialist in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In 1998, Hodjat co-founded Dejima Inc., serving as CEO and CTO, where he was the co-inventor of patented natural language artificial intelligence technology that led to the technology used by Apple for their digital assistant Siri. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Sentient Technologies and now holds the position of Chief Technology Officer AI at Cognizant.

Babak Hodjat was born on November 1, 1967, in Wimbledon. His father was a retired university professor in entomology who worked at the British Museum. As a child, he did not like insects and would wander off to the nearby science museum, where he would spend long hours in front of a computer they had on display.^[6] He attended middle school in the United States.

He studied at the Sharif University of Technology from 1986 to 1995, and received his Master of Science degree in software engineering. In 1994, together with another computer department student Hormoz Shahrzad, he presented their research titled "Introducing a dynamic problem solving scheme based on a learning algorithm in artificial life environments" at the first IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence held at Orlando. Hodjat received a PhD in machine intelligence from Kyushu University in 2003, and during his time there, he published several works on adaptive agent oriented software architecture and natural language user interfaces.^[7,12]

Hodjat moved to Silicon Valley, California in 1998 and founded Dejima Inc., named after the historic Japanese Dejima artificial island. The firm was based on a patented adaptive agent-oriented software engineering platform developed by Hodjat, Christopher Savoie, and Makoto Amamiya.^[8] Hodjat served as the CTO and as the CEO for nine months from October 2000.^[10] By 2000, the company had offices in San Jose, London, and Tokyo.^[9] In 2002, the company developed a voice control Natural Interaction Platform (NPI) in collaboration with Stanford University's Archimedes Project research group.^[11] During these years, Hodjat continued his research on agent-oriented software architecture and natural language user interfaces.^[7] In July 2003, Dejima got funding from SRI International within DARPA's Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project and worked on a Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) initiative.^[13] Hodjat was the primary inventor of the firm's agent-oriented technology applied to intelligent interfaces for mobile and enterprise computing—a technology that eventually led to Siri.

In April 2004, Dejima was acquired by Sybase iAnywhere.^[15] Hodjat served as senior director of engineering at Sybase iAnywhere from 2004 to 2008, where he developed AvantGo Platform and Answers Anywhere.^[10,17] In 2006, he co-founded MobileVerbs Inc., a mobile marketing service company, which was acquired in February 2010.^[18]

In 2007, he teamed with Antoine Blondeau (former CEO of Dejima) and Adam Cheyer (Dejima's vice president and Chief Architect of the CALO project) to establish Genetic Finance Holding Ltd., where he began as CTO.^[19] In 2014, the firm became Sentient Technologies.^[20] Hodjat was joined by his long-time research fellow Hormoz Shahrzad who became principal scientist, while Hodjat held the position of chief scientist.^[21] In the following years, Hodjat has worked on developing massively distributed computing technology and improving the machine-learning technique known as evolutionary algorithms.^[22] One area that gained special attention from the press was applying Sentient Technologies algorithms to stock market trading through the specially created Sentient Investment Management hedge fund.^[23,24,25] Following a management change within Sentient Technologies, Hodjat became the company's CEO in February 2017. He continues his business and educational projects, having served on the jury of the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE and the Merit Awards committee for the ISAL Award.^[27,26]

Hodjat's early publications include a 1994 paper co-authored with H. Shahrzad for the IEEE International Joint Conference on neural networks (IJCNN-94). On May 25, 2000, B. Hodjat and M. Amamiya published "Applying the Adaptive Agent Oriented Software Architecture to the Parsing of Context Sensitive Grammars" in IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems. In 2006, B. Hodjat, C.J. Savoie, and M. Amamiya published in PRICAI'98: Topics in Artificial Intelligence through Springer. That same year, Babak Hodjat, Siamak Hodjat, Nick Treadgold, and Ing-Marie Jonsson contributed to the Proceedings of the 2nd annual international workshop on Wireless internet (WICON).

In 2013, Una-May O'Reilly, Mark Wagy, and Babak Hodjat published in Genetic Programming Theory and Practice X with Springer-Verlag New York. Babak Hodjat, Erik Hemberg, Hormoz Shahrzad, and Una-May O'Reilly co-authored work in Genetic Programming Theory and Practice XI, published by Springer-Verlag New York in 2014. In 2016, Hormoz Shahrzad, Babak Hodjat, and Risto Miikkulainen published in the Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2016.