2009/11/04
Real time Social Media Monitoring and Marketing
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook plus millions of blog sites have enabled consumers to react to your products/service/brands in real time. How do you leverage on this real time interactions on social media? This event brings a panel of experts to share their experience in succesful social medial marketing and new real time social media monitoring/marketing tools.
Are you ready to engage with your customers in more effective ways? Online consumer conversations offer companies the opportunity to realize increased customer satisfaction & loyalty, shortened sales & product development cycles, expanded markets, competitive insight & more. Social media monitoring tools offer the opportunity to effectively identify the conversations, communities, and the influencers. But it takes more than tools, there needs to be a person responsible for this engagement and the social media tools. Connie Bensen from Techrigy (Alterian) will discuss the new marketing opportunities that exist & how your business can leverage them.
Jochen Frey from Scout Labs will present the Scout Labs’ monitoring platform, including some of the benefits and typical uses cases. He will also give a high level technical overview with a discussion of the challenges in dealing with the rapidly changing landscape presented by the social media.
Keith Kilpatrick from BuzzLogic will share how the rise of social platforms have transformed the digital media business and discuss the impact social monitoring/analytics have on making online advertising more effective and efficient. He will also provide insight into how BuzzLogic’s conversational media platform helps target and measure advertising across sites engaged in conversations around specific topics.
Agenda:
6:30pm – 6:50pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
6:50pm – 7:00pm Introduction by AJ Chen (Moderator)
7:00pm – 7:30pm How to leverage social media for building customer community, by Connie Bensen
7:30pm – 8:00pm Scout Labs’ real time monitoring platform, by Jochen Frey
8:00pm – 8:30pm BuzzLogic’s conversational media platform, by Todd Parsons
8:30pm – 9:00pm Joint Q&A.
Speaker Bio:
Connie Bensen, Director of Community Strategy, Techrigy (Alterian)
Connie Bensen is a leading authority on cultivating online communities and contributes to best practices for this emerging role. She also provides mentorship and inspires others to pursue this new career. Connie is the Director of Community Strategy at Techrigy, an Alterian Company. She is also a 2009 Fellow with the Society of New Communications Research and speaks at leading social media conferences. Connie blogs at CommunityStrategist.com, & Techrigy.com. She has previously worked with Network Solutions, Inc and ACD Systems. Prior to joining ACD Systems, Connie spent 9 years on the brick and mortar side of community building in public library administration, marketing & PR.
Jochen Frey, CTO, Scout Labs
Jochen Frey is the CTO for Scout Labs and brings significant technical leadership and experience in scalable systems development and natural language processing to the organization. As CTO of Meaningful Machines for 5 years, Mr. Frey managed a combined onshore/offshore research and development team to launch the highest quality machine translation system (Spanish to English, with high quality prototypes for other languages including Arabic and French). He architected and oversaw implementation of a high performance, failure tolerant message passing infrastructure and developed a high-speed distributed full text index. Prior to Meaningful Machines, Frey was the Director of Technology for the Eastern Region at Razorfish (previously iCube), architecting and overseeing numerous large-scale systems implementations. His past experience also includes software engineering for the US Navy and IBM, Germany. Mr. Frey holds a MS / Diplom Ingenieur in Computer Science and Medicine from the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Keith Kilpatrick, Director of Product Management, BuzzLogic
Keith is a seasoned product innovation veteran with over 10 years of experience leading technical teams in the delivery of online advertising and technology systems. At BuzzLogic, Keith is responsible for executing on the company vision of leveraging socially charged content for effective ad targeting, performance and data analysis. Prior to joining BuzzLogic, Keith worked at Adify, where he drove the delivery of a web-based platform for media companies and vertical advertising networks. Keith has held numerous positions in technology platform companies such as Blue Martini Software, SeeSaw Networks and Adobe. Keith started his career in consulting at Ernst and Young, holds a MBA from UC Berkeley, where he served as Class President, and also has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
AJ Chen – Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Inc.
AJ Chen, Ph.D., is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. As a Technical Architect at Healthline, he applies semantic technology in developing healthcare search engine for consumers. He has founded SDForum Semantic Web SIG to showcase how semantic technology and NLP are making the Web and social media more intelligent. Working with open communities, AJ brings social media content and semantic analysis together on web2express.org website, which enables users to follow and talk about topics in real time. From 2000 to 2006, Dr. Chen had been developing new genome sequencing technologies for personalized medicine, playing technical and product management roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Previously, Dr. Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to commercialize new medical innovations in China. Dr. Chen earned his Ph. D. in Biochemistry from U. of Utah and did postdoctoral research after joining Harvard Medical School and Duke Medical School.
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2009/09/02
Title: Bing! Bing! Bing!
With the recent release of Bing search engine, Microsoft has revitalized its life in the web search world. Moreover, the deal with Yahoo puts Bing behind Yahoo’s search box. Boom! (or shall we say Bing!) Bing is becoming the second largest search engine behind Google. Putting aside the crazy corporate fight, we are going to take a close look at Bing technology on this event. Hopefully, you will learn whether Bing has the real food to win over users and keep them happy. How does it mix semantic approach in web search?
We are delighted to have a chief scientist from Microsoft Bing to present on this event. Dr. Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search at Microsoft Bing, will discuss some of the technologies that drive the distinctive Bing UI, in particular the Explore Panel and the Instant Answers. Dr. Ronald Kaplan, Chief Scientist at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing,will describe some of the linguistic and semantic technologies that are deployed in Bing’s Reference section.
Agenda:
6:30pm – 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm – 7:45pm Behind the scenes at Bing, by Dr. Pedersen
7:45pm – 8:30pm Powerset natural language technologies in Bing, by Dr. Kaplan
8:30pm – 9:00pm Q&A.
Speaker Bio:
Ronald M. Kaplan, Chief Scientist and Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing
Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He was previously a Research Fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), where he was the manager of research in Natural Language Theory and Technology. Ron and his colleagues are responsible for the theoretical framework and computational implementation at the core of Powerset’s natural language technology.
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2009/07/01
Topic: Hacking the Semantics of Twitter
We want to do something different for the July 1st event. In stead of having company executives to present, we would like to give the stage to developers to showcase their projects of using NLP/semantics for cool applications. Since Twitter is the most popular topic these days and they are so generously opening their data stream to third-party developers, I think it will serve as the best theme for this developer-focused event.
We would like to invite all developers and companies to submit proposal for speaking on the event. Any cool twitter application is welcome, including personal projects actively pursued by developers or entrepreneurs. Preference will be given to applications that apply NLP, semantic technology, text mining, or data mining to make use of twitter data/api. The presentation should be focused on application design, coding and demo.
Doug Williams from Twitter API team will first introduce Twitter API. Then, it is showtime for developers. Each speaker gets only 20 min to present/demo/QA so that more projects can be accommodated on this 2-hour event.
If you are doing some cool stuff with twitter data, please send us a description on what you would like to talk about. We’ll review the proposals and announce the lineup at the end of month.
Agenda:
6:30pm-7:00pm
Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm-7:20pm
Doug Williams: Twiiter API introduction. http://twitter.com
7:20pm-7:40pm
Kevin Boer: Where are the breaking news in Twitter conversation? http://breakingsfnews.com/
7:40pm-8:00pm
AJ Chen: Using Open Calais and openNLP tools to study tweets in real time. http://web2express.org/
8:00pm-8:20pm
Christopher Peri: Managing incoming tweets. http://www.twittfilter.com/
8:20pm-8:40pm
Patrick Nicolas: Real-time semantic dashboard for Twitter
8:40pm-9:00pm
Sid Gabriel Hubbard: “tweegeo” joining LOD with twitter users. http://cloudstem.com/
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Semantic Web SIG Event, June 16, 2009
Panel Discussion: Entering Intelligent Web under Cover
(co-hosted with Semantic Technology Conference 2009)
The Web is getting smarter and more intelligent as we pushing the technologies to the next level. This panel discussion is dedicated to help the audience to look at the intelligent web layer under the cover. The distinguished panel of companies will present their exciting semantic and NLP technologies that are contributing to the buildup of the web intelligence, one of the most significant hallmarks of the next generation web. The audience will learn where semantic technologies are making impact and what tools are available to use. In the second half of the session, the audience will have chance to participate in the discussion of what new market opportunities are emerging given the growing intelligence of the web.
The panel will be focused on the following intelligent web applications powered by NLP and semantic technologies:
- Smart online publishing and blogging with semantics.
- Social networking with assistance from automatic natural language processing
- Question and Answer system on the web using NLP and semantic technologies.
- Gaining market intelligence from web conversation.
- Online advertising platform powered by semantic analysis
Free exhibit registration prior to the panel. Enter the coupon code of ST9A4 and use this link to register:
https://www.regonline.com?eventID=677058&rTypeID=131026
Save $300 on conference registration fees when using the coupon code of ST9A4 for a paid registration. To register for conference sessions: http://www.semtech2009.com/2009/registration/
Special, focused program: “Semantic Search Day” (http://semtech2009.com/2009/semsearchday/) on Wednesday, June 17 for just $95 when using coupon code ST9A4.
Speakers:
Brooke Aker, CEO, Expert System USA
Andraz Tori, CTO, Zemanta
Tom Gruber, CTO, Siri
Gam Dias – VP, Overtone
Amanda Reed – Partner, Palomar Ventures
Moderator:
Dr. AJ Chen, Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Inc.
Agenda:
5:00-7:00 pm Semtech conference exhibition
6:30-7:00 pm registration and networking
7:00-8:00 pm 10-min presentation from each panelist
8:00-9:00 pm Q&A
Speaker Bios:
Brooke Aker – CEO of Expert System USA
Brooke Aker is the CEO of Expert System USA, a leading semantic technology firm, and is a long standing speaker and writer in the areas of Competitive Intelligence, Knowledge Management and Predictive Analytics. Mr. Aker is a serial entrepreneur having formed both Acuity Software and Cipher Systems and was a member of the Intelligence practice at The Futures Group/Deloitte Consulting. Mr. Aker has worked with over 130 of the Global 2000 in the formation and operation of successful intelligence, KM or analytics units at such companies as Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Petrobras. He has conducted numerous workshops and given speeches at SCIP, Knowledge Management and Strategy conferences. From 2000 through 2002 Mr. Aker wrote the Competitive Intelligence Magazine column entitled “100 Ways to Beat Your Competition”. His technology development of intelligence/analytics systems have been recognized by and won awards from IBM, Strategy Magazine, and Fuld & Co. Mr. Aker earned a MA in Economics from Boston University and a BA in Economics from the University of Vermont.
Andraž Tori – CTO, Zemanta
Andraž Tori co-founded Zemanta in 2007 where he serves as a CTO. He architected Zemanta’s semantic-based analysis & discovery engine. Prior to that he hosted a TV show on information technologies at Slovenian national television (2002-2007). There he noticed the opportunity for authoring tools that understand text content. Andraz has been programming since he was 10. While acquiring his formal computer science education, he worked in media and NGOs. His mission is to take state of the art tech and hide it behind simplest possible user interface.
Tom Gruber – CTO, Siri.com
Tom Gruber is a researcher, inventor, and serial entrepreneur, with a focus on technology to augment human intelligence. He is cofounder, CTO and VP Design for Siri.com, an intelligent assistant for the Internet. His research at Stanford in Artificial Intelligence, particularly ontology engineering, helped lay the groundwork for semantic information sharing and the Semantic Web. He has created several products and companies that support human collaboration and knowledge sharing. He invented HyperMail, the widely used open-source application that turns email conversations into collective memories on the Web. He was founder and CTO of Intraspect Software, which pioneered the space of Collaborative Knowledge Management — software that helps large communities of professionals contribute to and learn from a collective body of knowledge. He designed and built RealTravel.com, a popular collective knowledge system where travelers from around the world share their experiences. Tom has been involved in an advisory role with LinkedIn, SocialText, Internet Archive, Mindjet, Powerset, and Radar Networks (Twine).
Gam Dias – VP of Product Management and Research, Overtone
Gam Dias is VP of Product Management and Research for Overtone, a real-time customer listening platform for customer feedback and social media. His group is responsible for pushing the boundaries of Semantic Technologies within Overtone’s brand monitoring product set. He has a broad enterprise technology background running Product Management and Product Marketing functions for Business Intelligence (Hyperion), Customer Data Management (Aviva Insurance), SOA Infrastructure (BEA), CRM (Oracle) and Retail Supply Chain (Lawson) vendors. Mr Dias has an MBA from Warwick Business School and a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Liverpool. When not working, he can be found online as his alter-ego, Gammydodger and experimenting with a C2C/C2B Social Networking application.
Amanda Reed – Partner, Palomar Ventures
Palomar Ventures was launched in 1999 by veteran venture capitalists to focus on early stage information technology companies that demonstrate the potential for exceptional growth and market leadership. Amanda opened Palomar’s Palo Alto office in 2001 after a successful career as a senior sales, marketing, and business development executive growing early-stage technology companies. Ms. Reed played a pioneering role in the e-commerce industry in the mid-1990’s at Connect, Inc., one of the early purveyors of online commerce engines. In 1996, her team launched PhotoDisc, one of the first e-commerce sites for digital content, followed in 1997 by the ground breaking launch of Time Warner’s online shopping mall, one of the foremost multi-merchant premium shopping marketplaces for consumers. As an investor, Amanda has maintained her engagement in the e-commerce and retail industries with investments in: Attensity (voice of the customer), MyBuys (personalized recommendations), Silver Creek Systems (product data quality) and Voxify (automated agents for call centers). With the operating experience of two successful start-up IPOs and two company acquisitions in excess of $100M, Amanda brings extensive early-stage operations talent and insight to the Palomar investment team. Amanda holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Dartmouth College.
AJ Chen – Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Inc.
AJ Chen, Ph.D., is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. As a Technical Architect at Healthline, he applies semantic technology in developing healthcare search engine for consumers. He has also founded SDForum Semantic Web SIG to showcase how semantics and NLP are making the Web more intelligent. From 2000 to 2006, Dr. Chen had been developing new genome sequencing technologies for personalized medicine, playing technical and product management roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Previously, Dr. Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to commercialize new medical innovations in China. Dr. Chen earned his Ph. D. in Biochemistry from U. of Utah and did postdoctoral research after joining Harvard Medical School and Duke Medical School.
(Please Note special time and location)
Time:
6:30 PM – 9:00 PM, June 16, 2009
Location:
Regency Ballroom, Fairmont Hotel, 170 South Market St., San Jose, CA 95113, USA (For direction, see http://semtech2009.com/)
Event Co-Sponsor:
2009 Semantic Technology Conference (www.semantic-conference.com)
June 14-18, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, California
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SDForum Semantic Web SIG March 4th, 2009 Event
Healthcare Semantics: Getting Personal
The nation’s healthcare system currently is in critical condition. The new President Barak Obama is pushing information technology as a part of the solutions for making our healthcare system more effective and efficient. According to discussion in the Congress, President’s economic stimulus package is considering $20 billion for heath IT spending. That’s going to shape up optimism for traditional health IT as well as innovations in new technologies like semantic technology and NLP.
On this event, we will be focusing on semantic applications in healthcare. Three speakers will cover the different areas along the healthcare ecosystem.
- Professor Ida Sim from UCSF will share cutting edge research of applying semantic technology and ontology in clinical trials.
- Niraj Katwala, CTO of Heathline Networks, will talk about how taxonomy is making all the differences in building top consumer-focused web destination for health information.
- Even healthcare payment is getting help from semantic technology. John Gilman will present his work at Blue Shield of California.
If you are wondering where the opportunity is for semantics and NLP, come and join us to explore the frontiers of healthcare IT.
Speaker Bios:
Dr. Ida Sim, Professor, UCSF
Dr. Sim is Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF and Director, UCSF Center for Clinical and Translational Informatics (http://ccti.ucsf.edu/). She received her MD and her PhD in Medical Informatics from Stanford University. Dr. Sim’s research is on knowledge-based technologies for clinical research and evidence-based practice. Her Trial Bank Project is a leading effort on using ontologies to share information about human studies. The goal is to computerize the human studyome – the totality of all human studies worldwide – for large-scale computational analysis and reuse of human studies data. Dr. Sim is a recipient of United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.
Niraj Katwala, CTO Healthline Networks
Niraj is an experienced software professional who brings 18 years of Internet and Healthcare industry experience to the Healthline executive team. Prior to Healthline, Niraj was a founding member and vice president of Engineering at Entigen Corporation, where he led the development of a search platform for bioinformatics databanks. From 1996 to 1999, Niraj managed critical new product initiatives in Charles Schwab’s Electronic Brokerage and Retail business units serving over 7 million users online. Prior to that, Niraj was a principal for Technology Solutions Company, a management consulting firm, where his clients were Fortune 500 healthcare and product organizations including Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Benckiser International, Pepsi Cola Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation. Niraj holds a masters and bachelors in Electrical Engineering from M.S.University, India. He is happily married with two children, and enjoys skiing, learning about world history, and coaching baseball and soccer.
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Agenda:
6:30pm-7:00pm
Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm-7:30pm
Clinical trials and Semantics. Professor Ida Sim, UCSF
7:30pm-8:00pm
Taxonomy-powered consumer healthcare search engine. Niraj Katwala, CTO, Healthline.
8:00pm-8:30pm
Semantic technology use case at insurance company. John Gilman, Director, BlueShield of CA
8:30pm-9:00pm
Q&A.
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SDForum Semantic Web SIG January 7th, 2009 Event
Semantics-Powered Search in Enterprises and Communities
We have used several meetings in the past to cover applications of semantic technologies in web search and web intelligence. But, the power of semantics does not stop there. In fact, semantics and natural language processing have been powering search in enterprises and recently have started to make impact on community and social search. These topics will be the focus of SDForum semantic web SIG’s January event.
Our first speaker Edwin Copper, founder of InQuira, will present InQuira’s semantic search technologies and his perspectives on the power of semantics. InQuira’s semantics products are powering many enterprises in all kinds of industries.
The second speaker Jennifer Dulski, co-founder and CEO of Center’d, will share her startup’s story. They are using NLP to make personal planning easier and smarter within web communities, including local and social search.
After the presentations, it will be your turn to ask questions and learn more insight from the speakers on how to leverage the power of semantics in your world.
Agenda:
6:30pm-7:00pm
Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm-7:45pm
Enterprise search presentation by Edwin Copper, founder of InQuira.
7:45pm-8:30pm
Community search presentation by Jennifer Dulski, CEO of Center’d
8:30pm-9:00pm
Q&A.
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Speaker Bios:
Edwin Cooper, Founder and Chief Scientist, InQuira
Edwin Cooper has been actively involved in natural language search for over ten years. While a PhD student, Edwin conceived of and led the OnPoint project, a Web-based information retrieval system with a natural language interface. He left graduate school to start a search engine company, which continues today as InQuira. He has a BA in History and BS in Cognitive Science from the University of California San Diego, an MA in the History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University, and may someday return to the University of Chicago to complete his PhD in Computer Science.
Jennifer Dulski, CEO of Center’d
Dulski is a co-founder and the chief executive officer at Center’d. Prior to Center’d, she held a variety of senior executive roles at Yahoo! during the past nine years, including group vice president and general manager (VP/GM) of local markets and commerce; VP/GM of Yahoo! Autos and VP of business unit marketing. As group VP/GM of Yahoo!’s local markets and commerce division, Jennifer was responsible for the strategy, operations and P&L for Yahoo!’s local, maps, shopping, travel, autos and real estate businesses. Under Jennifer’s leadership, all of those businesses became No. 1 or No. 2 in their category for the first time in Yahoo!’s history (ComScore, Sept., 2007). Prior to that, Jennifer was the founder and executive director of Summerbridge Pittsburgh, an academic program for at-risk students. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in psychology from Cornell University. Jennifer also holds an M.B.A. from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School
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November 5, 2008 event
Money’s Semantics
Continuing on the topic of our last event – emerging semantic online ad platform, this semantic web SIG event will be focused on the broader market where semantic technology can potentially deliver kill apps. We will have a panel of company executives and a venture capitalist to present and discuss business and market opportunities in online advertising, marketing, consumer voice or sentiment, and market intelligence. The panel will give the audience a broader view of how these exciting markets are currently being addressed by various technologies. Many VC investments have been given to startups in these hot areas. So, bring your questions and join us in the panel discussion on November 5th.
Presentations:
1. Tim Musgrove, CEO of TextDigger, will present their semantic analysis technology for optimizing online marketing. (30min)
2. Craig Norris, CEO of Attensity, will overview their text analytics solutions for understanding customer voice and market intelligence. (10min)
3. (Coming…) Presentation from an online advertising platform company, focusing on current opportunities and challenges in the online advertising space. (10min)
4. Sergio Monsalve, Principal from Norwest Venture Partners, will highlight the current investment climate concerning applications of NLP and semantic technologies in the online advertising and web intelligence markets. (10min)
Panel discussion with all speakers will be followed, which is open to the audience’s question and moderated by AJ Chen. (60 min)
Speaker Bios:
Tim Musgrove, Founder & CEO, TextDigger, Inc.
Dr. Tim Musgrove is the Founder & CEO of TextDigger, Inc., a Silicon Valley startup providing website owners with semantic profiling services designed to enhance their content aggregation and increase the findability of webpages. The TextDigger team came out of CNET Networks, where Tim was the Senior Research Fellow for Artificial Intelligence. At CNET his team developed patented linguistic technologies which today are used to auto-generate thousands of natural language texts posted on CNET’s award winning websites. Tim’s background areas of ontology, philosophy of language, and cognitive semantics are significantly visible in his development projects at TextDigger.
Craig D. Norris, Chief Executive Officer, Attensity Corporation
Craig is a high technology industry veteran with over 20 years of front line experience leading profitable organizations in the areas of strategy, operations and sales. He currently leads Attensity as the CEO and has served as chairman, CEO or COO of both private and public organizations, including Ion Systems, Workexchange Technologies and Connectinc.com. Craig has successfully navigated start-ups and early stage companies to IPO’s and other significant funding events, and has been continuously engaged with the completion of major sales to Fortune 500 organizations. Craig also brings to Attensity a strong management consulting and systems integration background, having been a regional vice president for leading international consulting firm CAP Gemini America.
Sergio Monsalve, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners
Sergio brings to NVP over 12 years of operational experience in marketing, product management, business development, sales and finance from a wide range of business and consumer technology companies. Sergio is focused on investments in the consumer internet, media and software sectors. His current investments and board seats include Adzilla, Center’d and myYearbook. Prior to NVP, Sergio was Vice President of Product Marketing at Photobucket, which was successfully sold to News Corp in May for a reported $300 Million. At Photobucket, Sergio drove product marketing, public awareness and user experience, which helped accelerate Photobucket’s growth to more than 40 million unique visitors per month. Prior to Photobucket, Sergio was Director of New Ventures at eBay, Inc. where he pioneered and led eBay’s digital goods marketplace and its user generated content efforts worldwide. Prior to that, Sergio was General Manager of the consumer electronics marketplace at eBay, which he grew from $150 million to over $500 million in gross merchandise sales in less than three years. Prior to eBay, Sergio was the co-founder and led sales and marketing at Cymerc from inception to more than $15 million in revenue. Sergio holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.
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9-3-2008
Title: Emerging Semantic Ad Platforms
Here in the summer of 2008 the Semantic Web is still waiting for a killer app. Proponents have looked everywhere, but they may have overlooked one big opportunity – the true money-making machines on the Web are the online ad serving platforms that power Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the like. Recently a host of new startup companies (Peer39, BuzzLogic, etc) have popped up to fill this gap. These startups are spending VC money to try to make smarter money machines themselves, and the large companies are not sitting on the sideline either (Microsoft, Adobe etc).
During this Semantic Web SDForum event, we will focus on how semantics can make ad-serving smarter. Walter Chang from Adobe will present a new semantic ad platform that leverages the billions of pdf documents out there. And since natural language processing (NLP) is one of the primary techniques used to understand Web semantics, we will be joined by Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters to showcase the new Calais initiative (OpenCalais.com) which supplies a free Web-based platform for generating Semantic Web data that can be used to produce computable semantics from any text and feed them into any new search service, Semantic Web application or semantic ad platform.
If you go home with a big new idea after this event, please don’t forget to say “Go semantics!â€
Time: Sept. 3rd, 2008, 6:30pm – 9pm
Location:
Cubberley Community Center
4000 Middlefield Rd., Room H-1
Palo Alto, CA
Directions
Price:
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
No pre-registration required
Agenda:
6:30pm – 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm – 7:10pm Introduction / Community announcement
7:10pm – 7:50pm Walter Chang: Adobe’s New Semantic Ad Platform
7:50pm – 8:30pm Tom Tague: Calais – The Calais Semantic Web Service and Free API
8:30pm – 9:00pm(+) Dedicated Q&A period
Panelist Bios:
- Walter Chang, Senior Computer Scientist, Adobe Systems
Walter Chang is a Senior Computer Scientist at the Advanced Technology Labs of Adobe Systems. His current research focus includes text mining, semantic metadata, automatic document analysis, knowledge representation, machine inferencing, and content ontologies. Previously, he was a Managing Director and Systems Architect at Scient (now SBI.Razorfish), an Engineering Manager at Oracle Corporation, and an Advisory Programmer in the Extensible Database group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He has served as an Adobe W3C representative and contributor to RDF-Schema and has also published works in the areas of extensible database systems, document indexing methods, and automatic semantic metadata extraction. He holds patents in the areas of signature coding, persistent object storage, ontology-based classification and policy recommendation systems, and automatic document analysis. Walter received MS and BS degrees in electrical engineering and computer sciences from Santa Clara University and U.C. Berkeley.
- Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters Calais initiative
Thomas (“Tom”) Tague leads Thomson Reuters Calais initiative, spearheading strategy, product development and partner relations. He also oversees the Calais developer community at OpenCalais.com, evangelizing the Calais Web service and its free and open API while working closely with commercial and non-commercial developers alike. Previous positions include EVP, Client Solutions for Darwin Partners and co-founder and COO for Tessera Enterprise Systems, as well as senior roles at Epsilon and Electronic Data Systems (EDS).
Moderator Bios:
-
AJ Chen, Ph.D., Technical Architect, Healthline Networks
Dr. Chen is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. As a Technical Architect at Healthline, he applies semantic search approach in developing healthcare search engine for consumers. Working with open communities including SDForum Semantic Web SIG and W3C’s Semantic Web HCLS Group, he is also exploring new approaches for sharing semantic data openly on the web. From 2000 to 2006, Dr. Chen had been developing new genome sequencing technologies for personalized medicine, playing technical and product management roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Previously, Dr. Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to commercialize new treatments and diagnostics in China. Dr. Chen earned his Ph. D. in Biochemistry from U. of Utah and did postdoctoral research after joining Harvard Medical School and Duke Medical School.
- Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware
Mr. Pollock is a technology leader and author of the enterprise software book “Adaptive Information” (John Wiley & Sons 2004). Currently a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, Mr. Pollock was formerly an independent consultant for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware platforms and inference-driven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built application server/middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and formerly an engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of object-oriented systems, software development process and enterprise systems architecture.
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7-2-2008
Topic: Weaving the Web of Data
In the beginning it was a Web of documents. These Web pages were simple and powerful. Static, yet capable of shrinking even the furthest distances. The static Web of pages yielded to a more dynamic Web of content, and Web 2.0 style content controlled by the collective mind of the masses. But today the Web is still predominantly a Web of documents. Will the Semantic Web and other linked data languages transform the WWW into a world-wide web of data, not just pages? Will Web mashups of the future become miscellaneous bits of data easily collected from far off places? In this SDForum interactive presentation we will explore these questions and more!
Join us for two unique presentations. First we will explore how you can make use of Metaweb’s Freebase free web database technology for hosting your own content, posting stuff, or making mash-ups of other people’s content. Second, our presenter from TopQuadrant will provide an instructional “how-to†for getting started with RDF and just a little bit of OWL – these two Semantic Web languages are a foundational part of the emerging data web since they were designed from the ground-up to be web-based data languages. Finally, we’ll tie things together with a joint question-answer session where both speakers respond to the SD Forum audience to help everybody stay on the same page.
Our expert guests include Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information from Metaweb Technologies and Dean Allemang, Chief Scientist from TopQuadrant. AJ Chen from Healthline and Jeff Pollock from Oracle will moderate this event.
Panelist:
-Dr. Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information, Metaweb Technologies
-Dean Allemang, Chief Scientist, TopQuadrant
BIOS:
Jamie Taylor is the Minister of Information at Metaweb Technologies, where he tends to Data Gardening and Community Building. His interest in large scale, non-relational data stores grew while managing Enterprise Software projects which used Dynamic Object patterns in his role as CTO and VP Engineering at DETERMINE Software (now a part of Selectica.) He was the founder of one of San Francisco’s first ISP’s and has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Behavioral Economics.
Dean Allemang is the Chief Scientist at TopQuadrant Inc., a company specializing in products, training and services based on Semantic Web technologies. As the lead instructor for TopQuadrant’s Semantic Web training courses, he has come into contact with a wide variety of viewpoints about the Semantic Web. In his speaking and writing, he tries to cut through the hype to present a coherent picture of how the Semantic Web can provide value to business. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Ohio State University and Masters in Pure Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Along with Jim Hendler, he is co-author of “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”.
Moderator Bios:
AJ Chen, Ph.D., Technical Architect, Healthline Networks
Dr. Chen is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. As a Technical Architect at Healthline, he applies semantic search approach in developing healthcare search engine for consumers. Working with open communities including SDForum Semantic Web SIG and W3C’s Semantic Web HCLS Group, he is also exploring new approaches for sharing semantic data openly on the web. From 2000 to 2006, Dr. Chen had been developing new genome sequencing technologies for personalized medicine, playing technical and product management roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Previously, Dr. Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to commercialize new treatments and diagnostics in China. Dr. Chen earned his Ph. D. in Biochemistry from U. of Utah and did postdoctoral research after joining Harvard Medical School and Duke Medical School.
Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware
Mr. Pollock is a technology leader and author of the enterprise software book “Adaptive Information” (John Wiley & Sons 2004). Currently a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, Mr. Pollock was formerly an independent consultant for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware platforms and inference-driven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built application server/middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and formerly an engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of object-oriented systems, software development process and enterprise systems architecture.
Agenda:
6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm – 7:10pm Introduction / Community announcement
7:10pm - 7:50pm Metaweb & Freebase – enabling the data web
7:50pm - 8:30pm Tutorial: Semantic Web standard RDF/RDFS and tools
8:30pm - 9:00pm(+) Dedicated Q&A period
Location:
Cubberley Community Center
4000 Middlefield Rd. Room H-1
Palo Alto, CA
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5-20-2008
Panel Discussion: Will semantics give web search a face-lift?
Thanks to Google, Yahoo and others like them, web search technology has been so successful that everyone simply enters a few words into the ubiquitous search box for answers to just about anything. However, the search engine’s huge success has also made us accept a long, albeit instant, listing of sometimes irrelevant search results. It won’t be a surprise that many consumers think that what these search engines currently provide is the best we can ever get. Are we fooled by the relative success of search engines? What is the next big innovation in search technology? This exciting panel discussion will focus on how semantic technologies are shaping the next generation of web search. Fernando Pereira, Research Director from Google and Peter Mika from Yahoo, will talk about how the market leaders use semantics to refine their already popular search engines. Startup companies will present their disruptive semantic approaches that may results in a new breed of search engines, speakers including Jer Miller from Wikia, Christian Hempelmann from Hakia, and Mark Fasciano from General Sentiment. After individual presentations, the panel and the audience will debate on whether and how semantics can really give web search a face-lift.
Agenda:
6:30-7:00 pm registration and networking
7:00-8:00 pm short presentation from panelists (5-10 min each)
8:00-9:00 pm Q&A
Speakers:
Dr. Fernando Pereira, Research Director, Google Inc.
Jer Miller, Search Project Lead, Wikia
Dr. Christian Hempelmann, CSO, Hakia
Dr. Mark Fasciano, Co-Founder, General Sentiment
Dr. Peter Mika, Researcher, Yahoo Inc.
Moderator: Dr. AJ Chen, Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Inc.
Time: 6:30 PM – 9:00 PM, May 20, 2008
Location: Regency Ballroom, Fairmont Hotel, 170 South Market St.,
San Jose, CA 95113, USA (For direction, see http://www.semantic-conference.com/travel/)
Price: $15 at the door. Free for SDForum members and SemTech Conference attendees. No pre-registration required.
Event Co-Sponsor:
Semantic Technology Conference (www.semantic-conference.com)
May 18-22, 2007
Fairmont Hotel,
Speaker Bios:
Fernando Pereira is research director at Google. His previous appointments include chair of the Computer and Information Science department at
Jeremie Miller, Search Project Lead, Search Wikia Labs
Jeremie Miller is the founder of the Jabber project, having created the XMPP protocol and written the first Jabber server. He is now working on tearing down the walls of Search and establishing an open source foundation complimented with a distributed open protocol for search.
Dr. Christian Hempelmann, CSO,
Dr.
Dr. Fasciano co-founded General Sentiment with Professor Steve Skiena from
Dr. Peter Mika, Researcher, Yahoo Inc.
Dr. Peter Mika is a researcher at Yahoo! Research Barcelona. He holds an MSc and PhD degree (cum laude) in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2002, 2007), and a BS degree from the Eötvös Loránt University in Hungary (1997). His interdisciplinary work in the field of Social Networks and the Semantic Web earned him a Best Paper Award at the International Semantic Web Conference in
AJ Chen, Ph.D., is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. As a Technical Architect at Healthline.com, he applies semantic search approach in developing healthcare search engine for consumers. Working with open communities, he is also exploring new approaches for sharing semantic data openly on the web, including co-chairing the SDForum Semantic Web SIG and coordinating the scientific publishing task force for W3C’s Semantic Web HCLS Group. From 2000 to 2006, Dr. Chen had been developing new genome sequencing technologies for personalized medicine, playing technical and product management roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Previously, Dr. Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to commercialize new treatments and diagnostics in
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3-5-2008
Are Scalable Graph Data Applications Possible?
A Look at C-Store, Java, and Data Grid Approaches to Semantic Web Applications
With the rising importance of data analytics, there is more evidence than ever that graph style data systems can achieve new benefits by making it easier to link and re-combine complex data. But the Achilles heel of graph style tuple storage has always been a lack of performance at scale. Will the Semantic Web and modern analytics finally drive innovation that makes these systems scalable? In this SDForum interactive panel discussion we will explore that question and more.
Join us for three unique presentations that will explore cutting-edge techniques for scalable RDF/OWL storage, and the kinds of applications that make use of those systems. First, we are honored to have representation from Vertica and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to describe how columnar store (C-Store) data warehouse technology can enable large scale data graphs supporting billions of RDF triples. Next, we’ll get a peek at some GeoTemporal and Social Network Analysis applications based off the federated Java RDF database from Franz Technologies. Finally, a short synopsis of Oracle’s various approaches for tuple-based storage (including in-memory, data grid, and Oracle Database RDF solutions) will be presented and tradeoffs discussed.
Our expert guests include Andy Palmer from Vertica, Samuel R. Madden from MIT, Jans Aasman from Franz Technologies. Jeff Pollock from Oracle will moderate as well as present a short summary of technical approaches to scalable RDF systems.
Agenda:
6:30pm – 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm – 7:10pm Community announcement
7:10pm – 7:50pm The Vertica C-Store DBMS for Scalable RDF Persistence
7:50pm – 8:30pm Franz Technologies RDF Applications
8:30pm – 8:45pm Oracle Infrastructure for Tuple-based Graph Storage
8:45pm – 9:00pm(+) Dedicated Q&A period
Panelist Bios:
Andy Palmer, Founder, Vertica
With a track record of five successful startups in the past 12 years, Andy Palmer specializes in founding and accelerating the growth of early-stage companies. In early 2005, Palmer partnered with Dr. Stonebraker to found Vertica®. Prior to co-founding Vertica, Palmer served as the senior vice president of operations at Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ : INFI) , where he was a member of the initial startup team.
Samuel R. Madden, Associate Professor, EECS at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Samuel Madden is an assistant professor in the EECS department at MIT and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests span all areas of database systems; past projects include the TinyDB system for data collection from sensor networks and the Telegraph adaptive query processing engine. His current research focuses on modeling and statistical techniques for value prediction and outlier detection in sensor networks, high performance database systems, and networking and data processing in disconnected environments.
Jans Aasman, CEO, Franz Inc. Jans Aasman started his career as an experimental and cognitive psychologist, earning his Ph.D in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behavior using Lisp and Soar. He has spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. From 1995 to 2004 he was also a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans is currently the CEO of Franz Inc., the leading supplier of commercial, persistent and scalable RDF database products that provide the storage layer for powerful reasoning and ontology modeling capabilities for Semantic Web applications.
Moderator Bios:
AJ Chen, Ph.D., Sr. Search Engineer, Healthline.com
Dr. Chen is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. Currently a Sr. Search Engineer at Healthline.com, he applies ontology and knowledge base for developing search engine focusing on consumer healthcare. Working with various open communities and open source software, he is also experimenting new and practical approaches that help make semantic data web a reality, including coordinating the scientific publishing task force for W3C’s Semantic Web HCLS Group. Previously, Dr. Chen had developed genome sequencing technologies for the vision of personalized medicine, playing technical and product roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Earlier, Dr. Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to introduce new disease treatments and diagnostics to China. Dr. Chen earned his Ph. D. in Biochemistry from U. of Utah and did postdoctoral research at Duke Medical School.
Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware
Mr. Pollock is a technology leader and author of the enterprise software book “Adaptive Information” (John Wiley & Sons 2004). Currently a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, Mr. Pollock was formerly an independent consultant for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware platforms and inference-driven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built application server/middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and formerly an engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of object-oriented systems, software development process and enterprise systems architecture.
Location
Cubberly Community Center
4000 Middlefield Road, Room H-1
Palo Alto, CA 94105
Directions
Price
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
No registration required
***
1-8-2008
Title: Solving Semantic Web’s Chicken and Egg Problem with NLP
In the first presentation, Dr. Barney Pell, CEO of Poweret, will describe his vision of Natural Language and the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web promises to revolutionize access to information by adding machine-readable semantic information to content which is normally interpretable only by people. In addition, it will also revolutionize access to services by adding semantic information to create machine-readable service descriptions.
This ambitious vision has been slow to take off because of a chicken and egg problem. Markup is required before people will build applications, and applications are required before it is worth the hard work of doing markup. Natural language processing (NLP) has advanced to the point where it can break the impasse and open up the possibilities of the Semantic Web. First, NLP systems can now automatically create annotations from unstructured text. This provides the data that semantic web applications require. Second, NLP systems are themselves consumers of semantic web information and thus provide economic motivation for people to create and maintain such information. For example, a new generation of natural language search systems, as illustrated by Powerset, can take advantage of semantic web markup and ontologies to augment their interpretation of underlying textual content. They can also expose semantic web services directly in response to natural language queries.
The second presentation will be demonstration of Powset’s NLP search engine and technology, given by Dr. Ron Kaplan, Chief Scientist at Powerset.
Lots of cutting-edge researches in this field are happening in academics. We’ll have Rio Snow, a PhD student at Stanford University, to present the Stanford Wordnet Project – Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge from Text. This talk describes their recent work in learning semantic relations and WordNet-like taxonomies from English text. The Stanford team uses machine learning methods to learn the hypernym (is a kind of) and coordinate term (is similar to) relations, and propose a model for inferring taxonomies that combine heterogenous evidence sources for maximal benefit. The Stanford Wordnet Project currently offers an augmented version of WordNet with 400,000 additional automatically-inferred hyponyms.
Agenda:
6:30pm – 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm – 7:10pm Community announcement
7:10pm – 7:40pm Barney Pell: Natural Language and Semantic Web
7:40pm – 8:00pm Ron Kaplan: Powerset demo and technolgy
8:00pm – 8:20pm Rion Snow: Stanford Wordnet Project
8:20pm – 9:00pm Q&A
Contact: SIG co-chair AJ Chen (ajchen-at-web2express.org) or Jeff Pollock (jeff.pollock-at-oracle.com)
Speaker Bios
Barney Pell, Ph.D., Founder and CTO, Powerset
For over fifteen years, Dr. Barney Pell, (Ph.D. Computer science, Cambridge University) has pursued ground breaking technical and commercial innovation in A.I. as a researcher, research manager, business strategist and entrepreneur. Prior to founding Powerset, he spent 2005 as Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield evaluating early to mid-stage IT and knowledge based companies. Before joining Mayfield, Dr. Pell worked for NASA Ames Research Center on two occasions: from 1993-1998 as Project Lead for the Executive component of the prize-winning Remote Agent Experiment; and from 2002-2005 as a Technical Area Manager responsible for research in intelligent agents, software architecture, human-centered computing, search, collaborative knowledge management, distributed databases, information integration, spoken dialog systems, and the semantic web. Between 1998 and 2002, Dr. Pell worked in technical start-ups serving as Chief Strategist and Vice-President of Business Development at StockMaster.com, a provider of internet-based stock-market analysis tools and later Vice President of Strategy for Whizbang! Labs, a provider of advanced text processing and search engine software.
Ron Kaplan,Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Powerset
Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Scientific Officer at Powerset, Inc. Prior to joining Powerset, he was a Research Fellow at the (Xerox) Palo Alto Research Center where he created and managed the Natural Language Theory and Technology research group. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University, where he investigated how explicit computational models of grammar could be embedded in models of human language performance. He has made many contributions to computational linguistics and linguistic theory, and he has also provided linguistic technologies for commercial applications. He served as Chief Scientist of Microlytics, Inc. a PARC spin-off, and delivered software that was incorporated in products sold by Microlytics, Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony and other companies. He served on the Technical Advisory Board of Inxight Software, another PARC spin-off that commercialized technology he developed. Kaplan is a past President of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a co-recipient of the 1992 Software System Award of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a Fellow of the ACM. He has also been a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds over 30 patents in computational linguistics and related areas.
Rion Snow, PhD Candidate, Stanford University
Rion Snow is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University working with Professors Andrew Ng and Dan Jurafsky. Rion works in the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing, with a focus in computational semantics. He leads the Stanford Wordnet Project, which aims at learning large-scale semantic networks automatically from natural text. His work on automatically inferring semantic taxonomies recently received the Best Paper Award at the 2006 conference for the Association of Computational Linguistics.
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11-7-2008
Title: Intelligence at the Interface
a technology showcase organized by Tom Gruber
The interfaces we use to interact with the world’s information are getting smarter. Web portals gave us someone else’s idea of the content we should see. Then came search engines, which let us tell the system what we want, one query at a time. We are about to see the next wave — intelligence at the interface — in which the system knows about us, our information, and our physical environment. With knowledge about our context, an intelligent system can make recommendations and act on our behalf. This SD Forum event will showcase four exciting new examples of intelligence at the interface developed by Bay Area companies.
- SRI will demonstrate an intelligent assistant system called CALO that came out of an ambitious program of AI research. It learns about your documents, email, people, schedules, and meetings, and learns even more as you use it. It helps you organize your information world, prepare for meetings, create presentations, and find information in the context of your work.
- Yahoo! Research Berkeley will demo ZoneTag and Zurfer, mobile-phone photo-driven applications that use your social, spatial, and temporal context to support and enhance key user tasks on the mobile device. They intelligently help you capture, upload, tag, view and search for photos on your mobile device, minimizing requirements on explicit input and user attention.
- PARC will demonstrate a mobile leisure guide, codenamed Magitti, which recommends places to visit in an urban environment. It pays attention to your time, location, past behavior and preferences and it also infers your current and future activity type to better target its recommendations.
- Radar Networks will demonstrate Twine, a newly announced online service based on their Semantic Web platform that helps people organize, find, and share their information more intelligently. It knows about the semantic content of information of all sorts, from web content to email.
Panelist Bios:
Adam Cheyer, SRI
Adam Cheyer is currently a Program Director in SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center, where he serves as Chief Architect of the CALO/PAL project. Previously, Mr. Cheyer was VP of Engineering at Dejima, a mobile solutions company, and before that, VP of Engineering at Verticalnet, an enterprise software provider. As Senior Scientist and Co-Director of the Computer Human Interaction Center (CHIC) at SRI International, Mr. Cheyer led a multidisciplinary team of researchers exploring web services, distributed knowledge, and pervasive computing.
Dr. Mor Naaman, Yahoo! Research Berkeley
Mor Naaman is a research team lead at Yahoo! Research Berkeley (Yahoo! Advanced Development Research). His research focuses on context-based tools and algorithms for interacting with media. Mor has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research in the Stanford Infolab also focused on management of digital photographs, thereby allowing (and requiring!) him to take photos throughout his working life. In previous careers, Mor was a professional basketball player as well as a software developer and a college radio DJ.
Kurt Partridge, PARC
Kurt Partridge is a researcher in the Ubiquitous Computing Area in the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His research spans a variety of areas, including context awareness, activity modeling, location modeling, mobile device interaction, and wearable computing. He is particularly interested in systems and devices that blend naturally with people’s everyday activities. Kurt received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2005.
Victoria Bellotti, PARC
Victoria Bellotti is a Principal Scientist and manager of the Socio-Technical and Interaction Research (STIR) group at PARC. She studies people to understand their practices, problems and requirements for future technology. She also designs and analyzes systems, focusing on user needs and experience and is an inventor on multiple patents and pending patent applications. Her past work encompasses domains such as transportation, process control, computer-mediated communication, collaboration and ubiquitous computing. Victoria is best known for her research on personal information management and task management. However, more recently, she has been focusing on user-centered design of context- and activity-aware computing systems.
Nova Spivack, Radar Networks
Nova Spivack is one of the leading voices of the emerging Semantic Web, often referred to as Web3.0. Nova founded Radar Networks to develop semantic social software. The company just launched Twine, a revolutionary new way to share, organize, and find information. In 1994, Nova co-founded EarthWeb (IPO 1998). Nova has worked at Individual, Xerox/Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and also with SRI International on the DARPA CALO program and nVention. Nova founded Lucid Ventures, and co-founded the San Francisco Web Innovators Network. As a grandson of management guru Peter F. Drucker, Nova shares his grandfather’s interests in the evolution of knowledge work. In 1999 Nova flew to the edge of space in Russia with Space Adventures.
Moderator Bio:
Tom Gruber is an innovator in technologies that augment human intelligence, individually and collectively. At Stanford University he did foundational work in Ontology Engineering and the precursors of Semantic Web technology. During Web 0.1, he built the first public library for sharing ontologies on the Web; led the team that deployed the first virtual document applications on the Web that generate natural language explanations in response to questions; and invented the first widely-used open source application that turns email conversations into collective memories on the Web. During Web 1.0, he led technology development at Intraspect, an enterprise software company that pioneered the space of Collaborative Knowledge Management — software that helps large, distributed communities of professional people contribute to and learn from a collective body of knowledge. During Web 2.0, he led technology development at RealTravel.com, a popular user-contributed content site where travelers from around the world find and share their travel experiences. During Web 3.0, he is working on technologies that will bring intelligence to the interface.
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9-5-2007
How Can We Make Semantic Web Usable?
The Semantic Web has been emerging over several decades but has yet to reach a stage where it is easily accessible, useable and beneficial to the majority of end-users on the Web. Everyone still ask the same question: How will the Semantic Web become useable? In the first presentation, Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, will discuss his outlook for the coming years as the Semantic Web begins to mature, and the stages it will go through. He will also discuss barriers to adoption and how to overcome them, and how forward-looking organizations can start working with the Semantic Web today. In addition he will discuss how the Semantic Web can benefit key application categories from advertising to e-commerce to search, publishing, collaboration and entertainment.
In the second presentation, Holger Knublauch, VP of Product Development from TopQuatrant, will introduce to you the building blocks of a usable semantic web: RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL and SWRL. These languages provide distributed and federated capabilities for resolving semantic differences between systems and databases. After the hands-on introduction to these powerful languages using TopBraid semantic development platform, he will demonstration how ontology-driven applications can be integrated with Web 2.0 technologies.
Time: Wednesday, September 5, 2007, 6:30pm – 9pm
Location: Cubberley Community Center, 4000 Middlefield Rd., Room H-1, Palo Alto, CA.
Price: $15 at the door for non-SDForum members. No charge for SDForum members. No pre-registration required
Agenda:
6:30pm – 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm – 7:10pm Community announcement
7:10pm – 7:50pm Towards a Usable Semantic Web, by Nova Spivack
7:50pm – 8:30pm Semantic Web’s Building Blocks: RDF/OWL, by Holger
8:30pm – 9:00pm Dedicated Q&A period
Contact: ajchen(at)web2express.org or jeff.pollock(at)oracle.com
Panelist Bios:
Nova Spivack, CEO, Radar Networks
Nova Spivack is one of the leading voices of the emerging Semantic Web, often referred to as Web 3.0. Nova founded Radar Networks to develop semantic social software. In 1994, Nova co-founded EarthWeb (IPO 1998). Nova has worked at Individual, Xerox/Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and also with SRI International on the DARPA CALO program and nVention. Nova founded Lucid Ventures, and co-founded the San Francisco Web Innovators Network. As a grandson of management guru Peter F. Drucker, Nova shares his grandfather’s interests in the evolution of knowledge work. He has a BA in Philosophy from Oberlin College and did graduate study at the International Space University. In 1999 Nova flew to the edge of space in Russia with Space Adventures. Nova blogs at Minding the Planet.
Holger Knublauch, VP, Product Development, TopQuadrant
Dr. Holger Knublauch is well known in the Semantic Web community as the designer and developer of Protégé-OWL. At TopQuadrant he is responsible for ontology development tools. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Ulm in Germany, 2002. Dr. Knublauch’s work in Germany was has resulted in the development of various clinical information systems, as well as in pragmatic design and implementation techniques for these and similar systems. As a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Stanford Medical Informatics at the Stanford University Holger was responsible for research and development of various components of the knowledge modeling tool Protégé including Protege OWL, UML interfaces and interoperability with a Meta Object Facility (MOF) format. He now is the lead developer of TopQuadrant’s TopBraid product suite that includes the
leading professional ontology development tool TopBraid Composer as well as the rich internet application platform TopBraid Live. Holger actively participates in the World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web Best Practices Working Group on developing guidance for building Semantic Web applications.
Moderator Bios:
AJ Chen, Ph.D., Sr. Search Engineer, Healthline.com
Dr. Chen is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. Currently a Sr. Search Engineer at Healthline.com, he applies ontology and knowledge base for developing search engine focusing on consumer healthcare. Working with various open communities and open source software, he is also experimenting new and practical approaches that help make semantic data web a reality, including coordinating the scientific publishing task force for W3C’s Semantic Web HCLS Group. Previously, Dr. Chen had developed genome sequencing technologies for the vision of personalized medicine, playing technical and product roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Earlier, Dr.
Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to introduce new disease treatments and diagnostics to China. Dr. Chen earned his Ph. D. in Biochemistry from U. of Utah and did postdoctoral research at Duke Medical School.
Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware
Mr. Pollock is a technology leader and author of the enterprise software book “Adaptive Information” (John Wiley & Sons 2004). Currently a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, Mr.
Pollock was formerly an independent consultant for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware
platforms and inference-driven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built application server/middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US
Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and formerly an engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of object-oriented systems, software development process and enterprise systems architecture.
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Will Web 3.0 Finally Give Developers a Real Model Driven Architecture Solution?
In this interactive panel discussion we will explore how the Semantic Web family of standards is quietly empowering the decades-old MDA (Model Driven Architecture) community. Despite 20+ years of promises from the software community, the original vision of CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) seems just as elusive as ever. However, recent activities in the past 18 months at the OMG (Object Management Group) indicate that another watershed moment for MDA is upon us. So, the question remains, can the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 technology like OWL (Web Ontology Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) substantially improve the ways we conceptualize, design, code, and generate enterprise software?
Our two expert guests will address these and other questions during the evening of July 30th at the SDForum Semantic Web SIG. We have the pleasure of hearing from Dr. Deborah McGuinness, who Chairs the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford and Elisa Kendal, the President and CEO of Sandpiper Software – which is one of the principal contributors to the OMG’s specification for the Ontology Definition Metamodel, along with IBM, Adaptive Software and others.
Time:
Location:
Cubberley Community Center
Directions
Price:
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
No registration required
Agenda:
Panelist Bios:
Deborah McGuinness, Acting Director, Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory
Dr. Deborah McGuinness is the acting director and senior research scientist of the Knowledge Systems – Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (KSL) at Stanford University and CEO of McGuinness Associates Consulting. Deborah’s research focuses on the Semantic Web, Explanation and Trust, Ontologies and Ontology Evolution Environments, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Semantic Integration of Information. Deborah’s consulting focuses on helping companies utilize artificial intelligence research and semantic technologies in applications such as semantically-enabled scientific data integration, smart search, ontology management, and online commerce.
Elisa Kendall, President and CEO, Sandpiper Software
Ms. Kendall’s formal training in Situation Semantics coupled with extensive systems integration experience led her to architect Sandpiper’s innovative, standards-based approach to knowledge sharing through the use of ontologies. She is an active participant in the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment effort of the W3C and a key contributor to standards such as the Object Management Group’s Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM). Prior to Sandpiper, Ms. Kendall consulted for Lockheed Martin where she drove the reuse strategy for the DARPA / TRI-Services RASSP program. Ms. Kendall served as product development manager for Aspect Development, a provider of component and supplier management systems. She started her career in development, integration, and deployment of ground-based communications, signal, and data processing systems at Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space. She holds an MA in Linguistics from
Moderator Bios:
AJ Chen, Ph.D., Sr. Search Engineer, Healthline.com
Dr. Chen is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. Currently a Sr. Search Engineer at Healthline.com, he applies ontology and knowledge base for developing search engine focusing on consumer healthcare. Working with various open communities and open source software, he is also experimenting new and practical approaches that help make semantic data web a reality, including coordinating the scientific publishing task force for W3C’s Semantic Web HCLS Group. Previously, Dr. Chen had developed genome sequencing technologies for the vision of personalized medicine, playing technical and product roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Earlier, Dr. Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to introduce new disease treatments and diagnostics to
Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware
Mr. Pollock is a technology leader and author of the enterprise software book “Adaptive Information†(John Wiley & Sons 2004). Currently a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, Mr. Pollock was formerly an independent consultant for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware platforms and inference-driven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built application server/middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and formerly an engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of object-oriented systems, software development process and enterprise systems architecture.
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Web 3.0 Semantics?
In this interactive panel discussion we will explore the business and technology implications of the emerging semantic technology standards and tools. Leading experts from across the industry will explain how this technology is already making an impact in our healthcare system, government agencies, enterprise software tools and consumer applications. But more importantly, we’ll ask our esteemed panelists to take a broad and sweeping view of the way that these new data management approaches may fundamentally change our everyday lives in the future. Along the way, and with audience participation, the moderator will challenge our panelists to rebuke the Semantic Web conventional wisdom in an attempt to cut through the fog of misplaced expectations and hyperbole to discover if the Web 3.0 phenomenon is more than a passing fad.
Our respected panelists include Eric Miller, President of Zepheira and former Activity Lead for all W3C Semantic Web Working Groups, Susie Stephens of Eli Lilly and current Chair of the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach Group, Ramanathan V. Guha of Google, Co-Creator of RDF and invited expert to both DARPA and W3C working groups, Mills Davis of Project10x and current co-Chair for the Federal CIO Council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice, Sandeep Maripuri, Senior Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton and an architect supporting several US Government R&D programs that leverage Semantic Web technologies. The Moderator for this Panel will be Jeffrey Pollock, a Senior Director with Oracle, former CTO of two semantic-tech startups and author of Adaptive Information, a John Wiley & Sons book about semantic technologies.
Time: Tuesday, May 22nd 2007, 7:00pm – 9pm,
Location: Fairmont Hotel, 170 South Market St, San Jose, CA (direction)
Agenda:
Panelist Bios:
Mills Davis, Managing Director, Project10x
Mills Davis is the founder and managing director of Project10X, specializing in industry research and strategic programs. Mills consults with technology manufacturers, global 2000 corporations, and government agencies on next-wave semantic technologies and solutions. Mills serves as lead for the Federal CIO council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) research into the business value of semantic technologies. Also, he is a founding member of the AIIM interoperable enterprise content management (iECM) working group, and a founding member of the
Ramanathan V. Guha, Member Technical Staff, Google
Guha is a computer scientist who joined Google in 2005 where he is responsible for Google’s Custom Search Engine project. Previously, he was a researcher at the
Sandeep Maripuri, Senior Associate, Booz Allen Hamilton
Sandeep Maripuri is a Senior Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton where he designs and implements data sharing architectures that apply service-oriented concepts and semantic technologies. In his current role, Sandeep acts as an architect and delivery lead for Applied Research & Development efforts within the Federal Government. Prior to joining Booz Allen Hamilton, Sandeep held architecture and engineering positions in large consulting firms and software companies. These included Ernst & Young LLP and Modulant, where he was an architect and lead engineer for one of the first commercially-available semantic data interoperability platforms.
Eric Miller, President, Zepheira
Eric Miller is the President of Zepheira which provides solutions to effectively integrate, navigate and manage information across boundaries of person, group and enterprise. Most recently, Eric led the Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. During his work at the W3C, Eric’s responsibilities included the architectural and technical leadership in the design and evolution of the Semantic Web. Before joining the W3C, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. in
Susie Stephens, Senior Researcher, Eli Lilly
Dr Susie Stephens joined Eli Lilly in early 2007 as a Principal Research Scientist for open innovation. Her role is to identify and foster external collaborations that complement Lilly’s research and business priorities in integrative informatics and tailored therapeutics. Previously, Dr Stephens worked at Oracle where she led the development of the company’s core infrastructure to enhance its capabilities for the life sciences industry. As such, she was heavily involved in providing support for RDF and OWL within the Oracle Database. Dr Stephens is chair of W3Cs Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group, and coordinates the BioRDF activity within the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group.
Moderator Bio:
Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware
Mr. Pollock is a technology leader and author of the enterprise software book “Adaptive Information†(John Wiley & Sons 2004). Currently a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, Mr. Pollock was formerly an independent consultant for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware platforms and inference-driven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and formerly an engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of object-oriented systems, software development process and enterprise systems architecture.
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The Tortoise vs the Hare – Ontology vs Folksonomy
The highly impatient web 2.0 community has embraced tagging and folksonomy as the best way to organize web content. However, there are over 60,000 registered users of Protege, the leading open-source ontology editor and knowledge-based framework. What exactly are these users building, and why?
Join us to hear Timothy Redmond of Stanford explain how and why Protege is so successful, and to hear Jeff Pollock of Oracle explain the business motivations for investing in ontologies, and why the market for ontology-based products is so much larger than the market for folksonomy-based products.
Presenter Bios
Dr. Timothy Redmond
Dr. Timothy Redmond received a B.S. in Mathematics from the
Jeff Pollock
Jeff Pollock is a technology leader and author of the enterprise software book “Adaptive Information†(John Wiley & Sons 2004). Currently a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, Mr. Pollock was formerly an independent consultant for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware platforms and inferencedriven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built application server/middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and formerly an engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of object-oriented systems, software development process and enterprise systems architecture.
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Shrinking the Meaningless Web: Semantic Technologies for 2007
The semantic web has always been about delivering more knowledge, not more information. While some proponents are fighting standards wars, others are just getting on with new applications. Join us as five experts discuss the emerging market and its emerging technologies.
Our panelists are Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital, Lew Tucker of Radar Networks, Giovanni Tummarello of Dbin, Alain Rappaport of Medstory, and Ramana Rao, founder of Inxight Software.
After short presentations, the panel will entertain your questions. No matter whether you are new to the semantic web or already deep into the “next big thingâ€, you should leave with a better understanding of new opportunities and of new tools to help get you there.
Presenters
Peter Rip – General Partner, Crosslink Capital. Peter joined Crosslink in 2006 as a general partner, and focuses on software, Internet services and infrastructure, and consumer services. Peter brings over 25 years of experience as a successful entrepreneur, venture investor, and institutional investor. He has focused exclusively on early stage technology companies. Before becoming a venture investor, Peter co-founded Silicon Compiler Systems, a major IC design automation software company acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1991. He began venture investing in 1992. He has specialized in investing in early stage companies, several of which have been acquired by AOL, CA, HP, Microsoft and others. Prior to joining Crosslink, Peter was a Managing Director at Leapfrog Ventures and the Managing Director of Knight Ridder Ventures.
Lew Tucker, Ph.D. – Vice-President, Chief Technology Officer of Radar Networks. Mr. Tucker has two decades of achievements leading advanced technology ventures in the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, and parallel architecture. Prior to joining Radar Networks, he was Vice-President of AppExchange at salesforce.com where he created and drove the growth of the AppExchange platform and online marketplace. In addition to his role at salesforce.com, Mr. Tucker spent 10 years at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he was Vice-President of Internet Services, having overall corporate responsibility for Sun Microsystem’s presence on the World Wide Web. Earlier as a core member of the first JavaSoft executive team and evangelist for the advancement of the Java technology platform he delivered Sun’s technology strategy at conferences, industry panels, and financial analyst briefings. These included presentations given at InternetWorld, JavaOne96, JavaOne97, JavaOne98, RedHerring, Byte Research Forum and other CTO conferences worldwide. Before coming to Sun, Mr. Tucker was Director of Development and Advanced Software at Thinking Machines, Inc., where he conducted research into machine learning, A.I., and contributed to the architecture and development of the massively parallel Connection Machine supercomputer. Mr. Tucker holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Polytechnic Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Biology from
Giovanni Tummarello, Ph.D. – Chief Architect, Dbin, & CEO, Sensible Logic. Giovanni Tummarello is the driving force behind the DBin project. DBin is the first, general purpose, complete Semantic Web Application; and in general it has been also a source of innovative ideas and concepts. Dr. Tummarello has a formal background in signal processing and machine learning, but has spent most of his Ph.D. and postdoc studies on Multimedia Metadata and Semantic Web technologies. He currently works at Universita’ Politecnica delle
Alain T. Rappaport, M.D. Ph.D. – Dr. Rappaport is Founder and CEO of Medstory. He was previously (1985-1996) Co-Founder, President, and Chief Scientist of Neuron Data, Inc., a world leader in artificial intelligence and other business-critical software components. He was a post-doctoral fellow and is currently Adjunct Faculty in the
Ramana Rao – Founder and former CTO, Inxight Software. Ramana Rao is currently advising a number of startups as he develops possible next ventures in the information intelligence space. He was most recently Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Inxight Software, a spinout from Xerox PARC. Across Inxight’s 10 year history, Ramana developed, managed, and evangelized Inxight’s strategic vision, products, and technology as well as played key roles in funding, marketing, and sales. Previously at PARC for ten years, Ramana performed pioneering work in intelligent information access, digital libraries, information visualization, and user interfaces. His work includes 25 patent filings and many highly-cited research papers. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.