About Foaad Khosmood

Foaad Khosmood (he/him Persian: فواد خوشمود) (pronunciation) is Forbes Endowed Professor of Computer Engineering at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) and research director at Institute for Advanced Technology & Public Policy. Foaad holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California Santa Cruz. His dissertation work was on "Computational Style Processing". A distinguished scholar, Foaad's research interests include natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence, digital government, interactive entertainment, game AI and game jams.

Foaad is co-founder and past president of Global Game Jam, Inc. where he was responsible for organizing the world's largest game creation activity (120+ countries). Foaad is the primary investigator for the Emmy Award winning Digital Democracy project, and Co-PI for African Californios project. He served as general chair for FDG 2019. He is a visiting scholar at Imperial College London (2025).

At Cal Poly, Professor Khosmood usually teaches AI, Interactive Entertainment, Computational Linguistics, Data Mining and Operating Systems.