Erik Thomsen
Chief Science Officer
Sensepoint
About Erik Thomsen
Erik is passionate about making complexity intelligible, so better choices become possible. He has spent his career building information systems that can unify the complex data realities of ecosystems, human populations, corporations, and/or governments with principled analysis and planning – to provide the highest levels of warranted trust for the decisions that matter most. Along the way, he has been fortunate to work on some of the toughest underlying problems in AI (e.g., warranted trust, collaboration, and self-adaptation), Ontology (e.g., grammars), Wellbeing Economics (joint optimization of human and ecosystem wellbeing), and Logic (models that support knowledge-intensive applications without paradox).
He is a world authority in multidimensional information systems, an internationally recognized expert in applying logic to information systems, and a well-known innovator in ontologically grounded approaches to autonomous AI systems and socio economic environmental applications. As an aggregation specialist at the World Bank, he developed their multidimensional environmental and human well being models. As a Distinguished Scientist at Hyperion Solutions, he designed the company’s first heterogeneous data integration engine and its first ESG application, seamlessly linked with their market leading financial software. Later, as CTO of Blender Logic, he designed a prototype situational awareness engine for all the satellites and debris in outer space and a neuro symbolic controller that significantly enhanced machine learning performance—recognized by the U.S. DoD Joint AI Center (JAIC) as an exemplar of advanced AI algorithms. He was awarded over $5M in government grants for applying ontological grammars to tackle hard AI problems. He is also the author of OLAP Solutions: Building Multidimensional Information Systems, used worldwide in graduate CS and MBA programs. He holds market defining patents in information complexity and semantics, and has published and delivered invited talks in both academic and industry venues, and chaired two leading industry organizations—the OLAP Council and the Analytic Solutions Forum.
