Lior Rokach

Lior Rokach is a computer scientist. He is a professor and the former chair of the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering (SISE) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). Lior was born in 1972 in Holon, Israel. He completed his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in 1998,1999, and 2004 respectively at Tel-Aviv University. His research interests lie in designing and analyzing Machine Learning and Data Mining algorithms and their applications in Recommender Systems, Cyber Security, and Medical Informatics. Rokach has co-founded four AI companies and has been awarded 22 patents for his AI and information technology inventions. He is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters.

Prof. Rokach has made core contributions to the field of machine learning by developing novel ensemble learning algorithms. He has been involved in creating and developing various novel recommender systems deployed in real large-scale e-commerce websites serving millions of users. He is the awardee of the 2012 Toronto Prize for young researchers. His research has been highlighted in many places, including the BBC Radio, CBS News, The Telegraph, Internet World, Israel Channel 2, Reshet Bet (Israel Leading National News Radio Station), and Galei Tzahal (the official Israel Defense Forces Radio), Yedioth Ahronoth (Israel’s largest daily newspaper), Haaretz (Israel's oldest daily newspaper), The Jerusalem Post, Calcalist, Globes, YNet and The Marker (daily financial newspapers).

Professor Rokach currently serves as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology and an area editor for Information Fusion (published by Elsevier). He regularly serves as a senior program committee member on related conferences (e.g. ACM RecSys, ACM KDD, and ACM CIKM, IJCAI) and has helped to organize several workshops.

Before Ben-Gurion University, Professor Rokach was involved for more than 15 years in information technology development and design. He was co-founder, CTO, VP R&D, and Chief Architect of several technology startups and mature public companies. In 2000, Lior co-founded Kamoon that developed Tacit Knowledge Management (TKM) software enabling organizations to maximize employees' know-how and expertise by matching requestors to the right expert, facilitating and capturing the interaction process, and measuring the process for continuous improvement. Kamoon Inc. has attracted total funding of 25 million USD from various venture capitals. In March of 2003, Kamoon acquired Actionbase, a provider of collaborative execution management solutions. Among Kamoon’s clients were FedEx, Sony, AT&T, Unisys, SAP, and others. Dr. Lior Rokach served in the Israeli Defense Force's prestigious central intelligence unit (8200). He is married to Ronit Flint. They live in Omer with their four boys.