Anatole Gershman is a distinguished career professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. His entire professional career has been dedicated to a simple question: How can we use Information Technology to act more intelligently? In a commercial setting, where he spent most of his professional life, he had to apply this question to activities that make business sense such as the creation of new productivity tools, products, and services. Every advance in basic technologies created opportunities for intelligent business applications. In the 1980s, he led the design and implementation of the first production-quality automated Natural Language Processing system that handled international money transfer telexes for Citibank. When he joined Accenture in 1989, he created a lab that explored the use of multimedia for knowledge management and training. He also built early, pre-web prototypes of interactive multimedia-based eCommerce applications. In 1995, he released the world’s first eCommerce agent that shopped the web for music CDs. His professional career started in Natural Language processing at Yale University where he got a Computer Science Ph.D. in 1979. At the end of 2006, he retired from the position of Global Director of Research and Chief Scientist at Accenture and joined the LTI faculty in April 2007.