Tom is Co-Founder, CTO, and head of design at Siri Inc., the intelligent personal assistant acquired by Apple in 2010 for over $200 million. Siri is now used over 25 billion times per month across all Apple devices in dozens of languages worldwide.

Tom earned his PhD in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst and was a research associate at Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Laboratory, where he pioneered ontology engineering and knowledge sharing technology for AI systems.

Tom gave a viral TED talk on humanistic AI with over 2 million views and is a founding board member of the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. He is credited with giving the term ontology a technical definition for computer science and created hypermail, an early email-to-web gateway.

After Apple acquired Siri in 2010, Tom led the Advanced Development Group at Apple for 8 years before retiring in 2018. He is now co-founder and CTO of LifeScore Music, Chief AI Strategy Officer at Sherpa.ai, and founder of multiple companies including Intraspect Software (collaborative knowledge management).

Siri raised $24 million before its acquisition and is now integral to the iOS and macOS experience, processing over 1 billion requests daily. Tom's research has over 60,000 citations and his humanistic AI philosophy advocates for technology that augments rather than replaces human intelligence.