Business and technologyליאור רוקח

Lior Rokach

Lior Rokach is an Israeli computer scientist and professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, known for his research in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

born 1972Machine learning researchFounding Ben-Gurion University learning labsThe MindDesktop projectUN panel on artificial intelligence

Occupation: computer scientist
Education: Tel Aviv University

Lior Rokach was born in 1972

Lior Rokach was born in 1972 and grew up and went to school in Holon. He did his military service in Unit 8200 of the Intelligence Corps.

He studied at Tel Aviv University in the Adi Lautman program for gifted students. After a bachelor's and master's degree in industrial engineering, he earned a PhD in 2004. His doctoral work, supervised by Oded Maimon, dealt with breaking large machine learning problems into smaller parts.

Before his academic career, he founded Kamon, a company for automatic knowledge management. At Ben-Gurion University he headed the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering and served as vice dean for research. He founded and leads the university's Machine Learning lab and Big Data lab, and headed a joint center with the Israel Police for computational criminology.

His research applies machine learning to medicine, bioinformatics, information security, recommender systems and social networks. He took part in MindDesktop, a project for controlling a computer by thought, which was shown to President Barack Obama in 2013. In February 2026 he was chosen for the independent international scientific panel on artificial intelligence of the UN, the only Israeli among its 40 experts.