Ben Vigoda

Vigoda interned at David Rumelhart's lab at Stanford University studying the effects of adding momentum terms to the back-propagation algorithm.

Vigoda graduated from Swarthmore Physics '97, and to complete his Master's and Phd in Neil Gershenfeld's Lab at MIT, MS ’99, PhD ’03, Post-Doctoral Fellow '04, MIT Visiting Scientist '05-'06. He was an Intel Student Fellow at MIT, and a Kavli Foundation/National Academy of Sciences Fellow, won second place in the MIT $50k Entrepreneurship Competition, and first place in the Harvard Business School New Ventures Competition.

While at MIT, Vigoda also co-founded Design That Matters (DtM) in 2001, a student led seminar that engaged MIT students with problems in under-served communities and developing countries. Design That Matters projects have won several young innovator’s awards, generated significant licensing revenue, seeded a startup company, and led to the establishment of a not-for-profit organization to support these activities. He also built an interactive virtual juggling system for the Flying Karamazov Brothers that they used onstage for nearly a decade, and co-founded the Experimental Musical Instrument Workshop at MIT that built novel instruments, hosted and recorded with composer John Zorn, and developed video documentary for Public Television.

In 2007, growing out of Vigoda's PhD at MIT and subsequent work as a Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), Vigoda co-founded and was CEO of Lyric Semiconductor, which developed the first microprocessor and circuit architectures dedicated to statistical machine learning.

At Lyric Vigoda helped author over 70 patents and scientific publications, and Lyric was named one of the 50 most innovative companies by MIT Technology Review. Lyric was successfully acquired in 2011 by Analog Devices, and Lyric’s technology is deployed in leading smartphones and consumer electronics, medical devices, wireless base stations, and automobiles.

Vigoda is currently the CEO and Founder of Gamalon. Funded by DARPA and leading Venture Capital firms to help develop a next generation of machine learning and AI technology, Vigoda is leading the development at Gamalon of Idea Learning and Bayesian Program Synthesis, with first applications to structuring unstructured data.

Gamalon was recently identified by MIT as one of the twenty-five MIT STEX25 technology startups in 2017 "particularly well-suited for industry collaboration. These young, vibrant companies have proved themselves with early use cases, clients, demos, or partnerships, and may be on the cusp of significant growth." Gamalon's work has been covered in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, Wired, The Christian Science Monitor, TechCrunch, and EE Times.

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