Ido Dagan

Short bio:

Ido Dagan is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, its current Department Chair, and a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. He is the founder of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lab at Bar-Ilan, a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and was the founding Director of the nationally funded Data Science Institute of Bar-Ilan University. His interests are in applied semantic processing, focusing on textual inference, natural open semantic representations, consolidation and summarization of multi-text information, and interactive text generation processes. Dagan and colleagues initiated and promoted the prominent empirical task of textual entailment recognition (RTE, later aka NLI). He was the President of the ACL in 2010 and served on its Executive Committee during 2008-2011, where he led the establishment of the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, currently one of two premiere journals in NLP. During 1998-2003 he was co-founder and CTO of FocusEngine and VP of Technology of LingoMotors, and later has been regularly consulting in the industry. His academic research involved extensive industrial collaboration, including funds from IBM, Google, Thomson-Reuters, Bloomberg, Intel and Facebook.