Jobst Landgrebe

Jobst Landgrebe is an entrepreneur and researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence, working on both the mathematical foundations and also the philosophical implications of AI technology. In 2013 he founded the company Cognotekt in Cologne, Germany, where he serves as managing director. 
He was born in Bergisch-Gladbach in 1970 and has five children with his wife Katja. He is grandson of the phenomenologist Ludwig Landgrebe, who was the last assistant of Edmund Husserl. His father Winfried is the son of the Jewish Ilse Landgrebe (née Goldschmidt), sister of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, a well-know German and French writer and translator. His mother Christiane (née Hochstetter), belongs to a German family of prominent theologians and scientists represented for example by Ferdinand von Hochstetter.
Landgrebe received his initial training in philosophy from Ludwig Landgrebe while still in high school. Between 1991 and 1998 he studied philosophy, classical Greek, medicine and biochemistry in the University of Göttingen, where he graduated in 1998 with an MD and a PhD degree in the Faculty of Medicine, with a dissertation on biochemistry (more precisely, on intracellular protein transport). 
From 1998 to 2002 Landgrebe was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry|Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, where his research focused on biostatistics and bioinformatics in neuroscience, and where he also continued his studies in mathematics. 
His scientific work in Munich focused on the neurobiology of stress, anxiety and depression, which was at that time a topic of considerable interest. While in Munich he also set up one of the first gene expression profiling facilities in Germany. 
He then returned to the University of Göttingen, where from 2002 to 2006 he held the position of Senior Research Fellow in cell biology and biomathematics and contributed to international research projects such as the Hue-Man initiative. During this time, he designed and established the University of Göttingen Transcriptome and Genome Analysis Laboratory (TAL) and created open source software for the analysis of gene expression profiles. 
He then embarked on a career in the world of medical informatics and life science consulting, where he played a prominent role especially in the HL7 community, working as a Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton (2006-2009) focusing on semantic interoperability in health care and drug development in the pharmaceutical industry. In 2009 he was appointed Co-Chair of the HL7 Vocabulary Working Group, and Health Level Seven International|HL7 Inc., of which be became a critical commentator. He also contributed to the health informatics standard (CTS2) on Common Terminology Services at the Object Management Group. 
From 2009 to 2014 he worked in various roles in the field of health informatics, initially with the Basel-based health informatics company Clinerion, where he worked on semantic interoperability and Symbolic artificial intelligence|symbolic AI. He then returned for a time to Booz, and subsequently worked as Head of AI and Analytics for the Allianz health insurance company.
In April 2013 he founded Cognotekt, an AI based language technology company whose software captures the meaning of text in a way that makes the text content available as formalised data for business process automation, a topic that is also in the focus of applied academic research. The technology is used in different domains, e.g. medical billing, insurance process automation Together with Barry Smith (ontologist)|Barry Smith he has published articles about the mathematical limits of AI. He also works in the area of ontology research.
During his career as an academic, Landgrebe created biostatistical software for the analysis of microarray data. At Cognotekt, the company he founded, he has co-designed and directed the creation of several software product lines, including: Wernicke® -- the core Cognotekt software for the automated transformation of language into mathematical logic -- as well as products for medical billing, automated claims management and Eloquent, a program for mailroom automation including automated extraction and processing of mail content.
Category: German people
Category: German entrepreneurs
Category: German researchers
Category:German scientists