Kenneth Baclawski

Associate Professor Emeritus

  • Semantics of data
  • Web service specification and deployment
  • Big Data and NoSQL systems
  • High-performance ontology-based computing
  • Knowledge bases for biology and medicine
  • Ontologies for life sciences, situation awareness, and financial services
  • PhD in Mathematics, Harvard University
  • BS in Applied Mathematics and Engineering Physics, University of Wisconsin

Kenneth Baclawski is an associate professor emeritus in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He co-founded several technology companies, worked in several consulting roles, and held positions at MIT, Haverford College, the University of California San Diego, and Harvard Medical School.

Baclawski’s main research area is data semantics. His diverse areas of interest require an understanding of data for interoperability of systems, integration of data from diverse sources, inference, question answering, and data mining. He has contributed to areas such as formal methods for software engineering and software modeling, data mining in biology and medicine, semantic collaboration tools, situation awareness, information fusion, self-aware and self-adaptive systems, and wireless communication.

Baclawski is a pioneer in Big Data, having consultant in the field at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1980. In 1993, he allegedly developed the search engine technology now called MapReduce, the basis for NoSQL search engines such as Google and Hadoop and one of the fundamental tools used for Big Data systems. Northeastern University patented this technology, and the patent has not been successfully challenged. Baclawski has been awarded 10 other patents related to high-performance search and information retrieval. Northeastern University sued Google for patent infringement, and Google paid a confidential settlement to Northeastern University.

Baclawski organizes and chairs numerous conferences and workshops in data semantics. He is the treasurer and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications.  He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ontolog Forum, the umbrella organization for data semantics initiatives. He chairs two standards committees: OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services for Digital Asset Management (which he is a founding member of) and OASIS Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services. He is a voting member of two other standards committees: OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services and OASIS Open Data Protocol (which he is a founding member of).