Dr. Sacerdoti has spent over seven years in general management positions. Most recently, in 1992-93, he served as Chief Operating Officer of Tolfa Corporation, a medical device and services company. Here, he managed sales, marketing, research and development, and manufacturing. He set marketing, financing, regulatory and technical strategies, and generated a level of sales which attracted $2 million in financing and a management team with a medical device background. In 1985-96 he served as General Manager, Products and Training, of Teknowledge, Inc. He had bottom-line responsibility for this operating unit of a pioneering expert systems vendor. By building a regionalized sales force and setting a product strategy emphasizing integration with conventional computing over AI pizzazz, he increased annualized revenues from software products and training courses by 70% to over $4 million in 15 months, enabling an IPO as a software products company. In 1982-83, he served as President of International Machine Intelligence. This was a joint venture between Machine Intelligence Corporation, which he cofounded in 1978, and Yaskawa Electric, now Japan's largest robot manufacturer.

Dr. Sacerdoti has also worked for over eight years managing research, development, and engineering. He served as Chief Scientist for Portola Dimensional Systems, where he recruited a multifaceted development team and released a highly innovative productivity application within 6 months of commencing operations. In 1997 he served as Acting VP, Engineering for Open Minded Solutions, devloping their first product and negotiating a successful distribution arrangement with Object Design, Inc., the leading OODBMS vendor. In 1994-95 he established the Apple Systems Architecture group, reporting to Apple's Chief Scientist, to coordinate technology developments across its business units. Here he developed, for first time in Apple's history, a comprehensive technology roadmap, executed special projects for the CEO's Product Strategy Council (including market and technical strategies for enterprise computing, client-server architecture for K-12 schools, and the Internet), and led the AppleSoft Architecture Council. In 1983-84, as Chief Technical Officer of Teknowledge, he dramatically accelerated the product release schedule, and put the money-losing custom systems work on a highly profitable basis. During 1978-81 he co-founded Machine Intelligence; developed its business plan and raised funds with the core team, and managed both systems and product engineering and r&d. Here, he built a product development group in machine vision which released the first general industrial vision system, and the first vision-guided robot. He also built and initially led a development group in English-language data retrieval, and then helped spin it out as Symantec, Inc., now a leading software publisher. (The product that resulted from this work, Q&A, was awarded "Product of the Year" in 1988 by both PC Magazine and Infoworld. It generated over $400 million in revenue before being discontinued in 2000 after a 16-year life.)

Dr. Sacerdoti is also well-known for his basic research in Artificial Intelligence. From 1972-79 he managed and performed research at SRI International's AI Center. Here he pioneered what is now known as "modern problem solving." As Associate Center Director he developed, marketed and participated in research programs in automated and interactive problem-solving, natural-language interaction with data bases, distributed robotics, and programming languages.

Dr. Sacerdoti received a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. He has written a book and over 20 papers and articles on a wide range of advanced software topics. He is the inventor of three U.S. patents, as well as three others in the application process. He is a co-founder of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and served as a member of the editorial boards of Cognitive Science, Robotics World, and AI Expert, and Conference Chair for AIPS-96.

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