Witbrock is a native of New Zealand and is the former vice president of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine artificial intelligence.

Witbrock was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Before joining Cycorp, he was a principal scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge-based approaches to understanding Web user behavior; he has also been associated with Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center and the Informedia Digital Library at Carnegie Mellon.

[1] In 2019, Witbrock was recruited by the government and returned to his home country to establish and lead AI research initiatives in New Zealand[2] Witbrock's dissertation work was on speaker modeling; before going to Cycorp, he published in a broad range of areas, including: His work at Cycorp has focused on improving its knowledge formation efforts, particularly dialogue processing, machine reasoning, and on improving accessibility to the Cyc project.

At the University of Auckland, Witbrock's research spans natural language processing, multi-hop reasoning, causal inference, graph neural networks, focusing on advancing AI's interpretability, robustness, and real-world applications.