Merrick Furst

Merrick Furst, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the

Center for Deliberate Innovation (CDI) at Georgia Tech. In 2011, he founded

Flashpoint, a first-of-its-kind deliberate innovation studio, to develop formative

leaders and exceptional technology startups. Flashpoint was the thirty-sixth startup

accelerator worldwide, very early in the development of business accelerators.

Both at Flashpoint and at CDI, Furst works with hundreds of founders and

innovators and is developing the discipline of Deliberate Innovation. To date,

Furst has personally started eight startups.

Furst has been teaching entrepreneurship in an innovative form since 2006. He was a professor and the

President of the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, and previously, was a professor

and Associate Dean in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. He received his Ph.D. in

Computer Science from Cornell University.

Furst is known for seminal research in algorithms, complexity theory, and AI. He co-invented probabilistic

circuit analysis and planning graphs, which are considered among the most influential breakthroughs in the

field of AI planning.