AI People Wiki

Builders & open source

Peter Staar

Chairperson, Technical Advisory Council, LF AI & Data Foundation

  • Chairperson, Technical Advisory Council, LF AI & Data Foundation1
  • Principal Research Staff Member, Master Inventor and manager of the AI for Knowledge group, IBM Research, IBM1

Peter W. J. Staar is a Principal Research Staff Member, Master Inventor and manager of the AI for Knowledge group at IBM Research, and chairs the Technical Advisory Council of the LF AI & Data Foundation. Staar is the technical lead and TAC chair of Docling, the open-source document conversion toolkit hosted by LF AI & Data, and a maintainer of its repository.123

At a glance

Current roles
Chairperson, Technical Advisory Council +1 more
Sector
Company
Work listed
3
Honors
3
Sources cited
7
Profile reviewed

Career

Staar first worked at IBM as a summer student in 2006 and, after postdoctoral work in theoretical physics and scientific computing at ETH Zurich, joined IBM Research as a postdoctoral researcher in 2014. Over the following decade Staar led IBM's document AI platform from the Corpus Conversion Service and Deep Search to an open-source document intelligence stack.14

Staar now manages IBM Research's AI for Knowledge group and chairs the LF AI & Data Technical Advisory Council, as well as the TAC of Docling and of Doclang, an initiative on structured document representation.1

Open-source work

Docling parses documents into a unified representation for generative AI applications and is released under the MIT license as an LF AI & Data project. Staar is the senior author of its 2024 technical report and 2025 toolkit paper and is listed among the repository's maintainers.2563

Earlier datasets from Staar's group include DocLayNet, a human-annotated dataset for document-layout analysis, a task the paper describes as key to high-quality PDF conversion.7

Work and contributions

  • Docling Open-source code

    Technical lead and senior author of the Docling technical report (2024) and toolkit paper (2025); the MIT-licensed project converts documents for use with generative AI and is hosted by the LF AI & Data Foundation.5621

  • Corpus Conversion Service Published research

    First author of the 2018 paper on the Corpus Conversion Service, a machine-learning platform for ingesting documents at scale, an early part of IBM's document AI platform.41

  • DocLayNet Open data

    Senior author of DocLayNet, a 2022 human-annotated dataset for document-layout analysis.7

Timeline

  1. Joined IBM Research as a postdoctoral researcher.1
  2. First-authored the Corpus Conversion Service paper on ingesting documents at scale.4
  3. Was the senior author of DocLayNet, a dataset for document-layout analysis.7
  4. Was the senior author of the Docling Technical Report.5
  5. Was the senior author of the paper on Docling as an open-source document conversion toolkit.6

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

  • Postdoctoral researcher in theoretical physics and the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (before 2014), ETH Zurich1

Honors and recognition

  • ACM Gordon Bell Prize · Association for Computing Machinery, 20151
  • IPDPS Best Paper Award · IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 20161
  • IAAI Innovative Application Award · AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 20211

Where they work

Suggest a correction or removal

Profiles cover public professional work only, and each statement cites a source. If something is out of date, missing or wrong, tell us and link a source. People can also ask for their profile to be corrected or removed.

References

7 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. People — LF AI & Data FoundationLF AI & Data Foundation · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. docling-project/docling README (MIT license; LF AI & Data project)Docling project (GitHub repository) · Repository · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. docling-project/docling MAINTAINERS.mdDocling project (GitHub repository) · Repository · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. Corpus Conversion Service: A Machine Learning Platform to Ingest Documents at Scale (arXiv 1806.02284)arXiv · Paper · published May 24, 2018 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  5. Docling Technical Report (arXiv 2408.09869)arXiv · Paper · published Aug 19, 2024 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  6. Docling: An Efficient Open-Source Toolkit for AI-driven Document Conversion (arXiv 2501.17887)arXiv · Paper · published Jan 27, 2025 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  7. DocLayNet: A Large Human-Annotated Dataset for Document-Layout Analysis (arXiv 2206.01062)arXiv · Paper · published Jun 2, 2022 · accessed Oct 21, 2026