Doug Lenat

Douglas Lenat
Nationality	United States
Education	Applied Mathematics (Ph.D.)
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University
Occupation	Computer scientist
Employer	Cycorp, Inc.
Known for	Lisp programming language, CEO of Cycorp, Inc., AM, Eurisko, Cyc

Douglas Bruce Lenat (born 1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence. He has worked on machine learning (with his AM and Eurisko programs), knowledge representation, blackboard systems, and "ontological engineering" (with his Cyc program at MCC and at Cycorp). He has also worked in military simulations and published a critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism based on his experience with Eurisko. Lenat was one of the original Fellows of the AAAI.

Lenat's quest, in the Cyc project, is to build the basis of a general artificial intelligence by manually representing knowledge in the formal language, CycL, based on extensions to first-order predicate calculus.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Lenat received his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Physics, and his Master's degree in Applied Mathematics in 1972. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University (published in Knowledge-based systems in artificial intelligence, along with the Ph.D. thesis of Randall Davis, McGraw-Hill, 1982) in 1976. His advisor was Professor Edward Feigenbaum.