Moshe Koppel

Moshe Koppel is an American-Israeli computer scientist, Talmud scholar and political scientist. Koppel was born and raised in New-York, where he received a traditional Jewish education. He received a B.A. from Yeshiva University and in 1979 completed his doctorate in mathematics under the supervision of Martin Davis at the Courant Institute of New York University. He spent a post-doctoral year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before moving to Israel in 1980. He has been a member of the Department of Computer Science in Bar-Ilan University since then.

Koppel is best known for his research on authorship attribution. Together with Shlomo Engelson Argamon and Jonathan Schler, he has shown that statistical analysis of word usage in a document can be used to determine an author's gender, age, native language and personality type. The findings regarding gender generated considerable controversy. In a string of papers, Koppel and colleagues solved many of the main problems in authorship, including authorship verification and authorship attribution with huge open candidate sets. In recent years, Koppel has published several papers in social choice theory, offering (in joint work with Avraham Diskin) formal definitions of a number of concepts, including disproportionality, and voting power the definitions of which had been the subject of controversy. In related work, Koppel and colleagues have shown how the wisdom of crowds could be optimally exploited. Along with Nathan Netanyahu and Omid David, Koppel showed that, using only records of games played by grandmasters, a chess program could be trained essentially from scratch to play at grandmaster level. A program designed by Omid David based on these ideas placed second in the speed chess competition in the 2008 World Computer Chess Championship.

Koppel has written two books on the Talmud. Meta-Halakhah showed how ideas formalized in mathematical logic could be used to explicate how the ancient Rabbis understood the unfolding of Jewish law.Seder Kinim is a mathematical commentary on Tractate Kinim, generally regarded as the most difficult tractate in the Mishna.

...
Wikipedia