After receiving his PhD in philosophy from the City University of New York, Thomas Ferguson spent several years in industry working on the Cyc artificial intelligence project before moving to the data firm Dun & Bradstreet as their principal ontologist. After postdoc positions at the Inst. for Logic, Language & Computation at the University of Amsterdam, the University of St. Andrews, and the Institutes of Philosophy and Computer Science at the Czech Academy of Science, he arrived at RPI.