Erik Graf

Prof. Erik Graf is a Professor for Data Engineering and Head of the Data Engineering Specialisation at Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), located in Biel. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow and has 12+ years of industrial R&D experience in NLP and information retrieval. His expertise spans scalable AI solutions for real-world problems, with a focus on cognitive science intersections with IR and NLP.

Education: PhD in Information Retrieval (2007-2011, University of Glasgow).

Research interests include Natural Language Processing, Fin-Tech/Legal-Tech applications, and applied machine learning. Notable projects include the Cortical.io Retina semantic search engine and Contract Intelligence Engine. He previously served as Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical.io, leading development of enterprise NLP solutions.

Awards include Best AI Start-up 2015 and CB Insights AI-100 2017 recognition for Cortical.io. Active in academia-industry collaboration, he is part of the Data Science and Engineering Research Group at BFH and member of ACM and the Swiss Profile Commission for Data Science.