Boris Gershevich Katz (born October 5, 1947, in Kishinev, Moldavian SSR, Soviet Union) is an American principal research scientist and computer scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the head of the laboratory's InfoLab Group.^[1,2] Associated with Moscow State University, he was able to leave the USSR with the help of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy before the end of the Cold War.^[3,4,5] His research interests include natural language processing and understanding, machine learning, and intelligent information access. Over the last several decades, Katz has been developing the START natural language system, which allows users to access various types of information using English.^[6] His brother, Victor Kac, is a mathematician at MIT.

Boris Katz was born on October 5, 1947, in Chișinău in the family of Hersh Katz (died 1976) and Hayki (Klara) Landman (born 1921, Lipcani, Briceni District - died 2006, Cambridge, Middlesex County), who moved from Lipcani, a town located in northern Bessarabia, to Chișinău before the war. He graduated from Moscow State University and defended his thesis as a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences in 1975 under the supervision of Evgenii M. Landis.^[7] In November 1978, he left for the United States thanks to the personal intervention of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.^[7]

He currently lives in Boston and heads the InfoLabresearch team at the Laboratory of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Boris Katz is the creator of the START information processing system (since 1993 - on the Internet) and the author of several works in the field of processing, generation and perception of natural languages, machine learning, and accelerated access to multimedia information.^[8]

His brothers are Victor Gershevich Katz, an American mathematician and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mikhail Gershevich Katz, an Israeli mathematician, graduate of Harvard and Columbia (Ph.D., 1984) universities, professor at Bar-Ilan University, and author of the monograph "Systolic Geometry and Topology" (Mathematical Surveys and Monographs, vol. 137, American Mathematical Society: Providence, 2007).^[9] His daughter is Luba Katz, a bioinformatics scientist, whose husband is Alan Jasanoff, a neuroimaging scientist and professor at MIT, and the son of Harvard University professors Jay Jasanoff and Sheila Jasanoff.^[10,11,12]

In "A Knowledge Entry System for Subject Matter Experts", the goal of the SHAKEN project is to enable subject matter experts, without any assistance from AI technologists, to assemble models of processes and mechanisms so that questions about them can be answered by declarative inference and simulation. Other past works include "Exploiting lexical regularities in designing natural language systems" and "Word sense disambiguation for information retrieval". Additionally, research includes "HIKE (HPKB integrated knowledge environment)- a query interface and integrated knowledge environment for HPKB".

Further works explore question answering and semantic technologies, including "Quantitative evaluation of passage retrieval algorithms for question answering" and "Sticky notes for the semantic web". Additional contributions in this area include "Question answering from the web using knowledge annotation and knowledge mining techniques" and "The role of context in question answering systems".