Patrick’s fascination with artificial intelligence began in third grade after reading Arthur C. Clarke’s *2001: A Space Odyssey*. In 1992, inspired by the *Parallel Distributed Processing* volumes, he trained his first neural network to learn distributed representations of concepts.

Patrick earned a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the New School for Social Research, where he received the Dissertation Fellowship, the Alfred J. Marrow Memorial Award in Psychology, and became the inaugural recipient of the Charles Cannell Fund award from the University of Michigan for his innovative mathematical modeling of concept processing. During his doctoral studies, he interned at Dragon Systems—a speech recognition pioneer later acquired by Nuance—and at AT&T Labs-Research, where he spearheaded advancements in speech and multimodal understanding technologies. He then joined the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), an AI hub at Stanford University.

As a research scientist at Stanford’s Computational Semantics Lab, Patrick contributed to the $200M DARPA CALO AI project, developing machine learning techniques to extract concepts and topics from natural, spontaneous conversations. In 2008, he returned to AT&T in San Francisco, joining the nascent R&D team at AT&T Interactive. There, he led the development of *AT&T Speak4it*, the first mobile app to leverage cloud-based speech recognition and, later, the first to integrate simultaneous speech and gesture for multimodal search. Patrick also played a key role in launching AT&T’s Speech API, a cloud-based speech recognition service.

With ten U.S. patents to his name and over 70 research publications, Patrick has made significant contributions to computational semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, word sense disambiguation, human concept learning, and artificial intelligence. His work has been cited in more than 1,500 scientific papers. He currently serves on the Advisory Board for Digility, a conference and expo on Digital Reality, and The Flight Exchange, a charter aircraft booking platform.