Catherine is a senior research scientist at eBay Research Labs where she develops technologies to extract intelligence from semi-structured e-commerce data. Her research interests and experience is in text mining/knowledge discovery from text and semantic search. Prior to joining eBay Catherine was a cofounder and the CTO of Kaidara, where she designed tools to retrieve and analyze customer data for the automotive, high-tech and pharmaceutical industries. Prior to that, Catherine was a senior computer scientist at the PriceWaterhouseCoopers technology center and a principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center. She was the NASA lead of the DEDAL project, an intelligent documentation tool for engineers and scientists that learned from its experience with users. Catherine is the author of numerous peer-reviewed papers, some book chapters and she is a co-inventor on several patents. She holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris.

Jeff Catlin has over 15 years of experience in the fields of search, classification and text analytics products and services. He has held technical, managerial and senior management positions within a variety of companies including Thomson Financial and Sovereign Hill Software. Prior to the formation of Lexalytics, Jeff acted as the General Manager for the unstructured data group of LightSpeed Software where he was responsible for sales, marketing and development efforts for the Knowledge Appliance and iFocus products. Prior to joining LightSpeed, he was co-owner of PleasantStreet Technologies which produced a news-filtering product. Jeff graduated from UMass Amherst with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1987.

Ronen Feldman is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Business School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received his B.Sc. in Math, Physics and Computer Science from the Hebrew University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in NY. He was an Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern Business School. He is the founder of ClearForest Corporation, a Boston based company specializing in development of text mining tools and applications that was acquired by Reuters in 2007. He is the co-founder of Digital Trowel, a Text Mining company based in Israel. He has given more than 30 tutorials on text mining and information extraction and authored over 100 papers on these topics. He is the author of the book "The Text Mining Handbook" published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.

Chiara Francalanci is an associate professor of information systems at Politecnico di Milano. She has a master's degree in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where she has also completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science. As part of her post doctoral studies, she has worked for two years at the Harvard Business School as a Visiting Researcher. She has authored articles on the economics of IT and on data quality, lead research and management consulting projects, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Information Technology and Senior Editor of the AIS Transactions on Enterprise Systems.

Armando Gonzalez is President & CEO of RavenPack, the leading provider of real time news analysis in finance. Armando is an expert in the field of text analytics and applied semantic technologies. At RavenPack, he has designed systems that turn textual news into data that can be easily consumed by quantitative models and trading programs. These state of the art systems can process content from thousands of sources with low latency and automatically read and analyze tens of thousands of news stories in real-time. Armando is widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable authorities on automated news and sentiment analysis. His commentary and research has appeared in leading business media such as the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, CNBC, The Trade News, among others. Armando is a recognized speaker at conferences on behavioral finance and algorithmic trading across the globe.

Seth Grimes is an analytics strategist with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation. He is contributing editor at TechWeb's InformationWeek, founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit, Sentiment Analysis Symposium, and Smart Content conference, and text analytics channel expert for TechTarget's BeyeNETWORK.com. He is the leading industry analyst covering text analytics. Seth consults, writes, and speaks on business intelligence, data management and analysis systems, text mining, visualization, and related topics.

Michael House is Division Vice President for Maritz Research, leading the Text Analytics Group, a team charged with integrating text analytics and natural language processing technologies to support Maritz's Customer Experience Measurement solutions. Michael has experience in all phases of market research, including design, fieldwork, data processing, and marketing sciences. Michael worked at NFO Research Inc., Audits & Surveys, Inc., and the U.S.D.A. National Agricultural Statistics Service as a statistician and analyst. Michael received a Master of Science degree in statistics at The Ohio State University. He is a member of the American Marketing Association.

Dr. Nitin Indurkhya is co-editor of Handbook of Natural Language Processing (2nd Edition), and co-author of 3 other books on data and text mining. He is Principal Research Scientst at EBay Research Labs, California, USA as well as Adjunct Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is also the founder and president of Data-Miner Pty Ltd, an Australian company engaged in data-mining consulting and education. He has published extensively on data mining and has considerable experience with industrial data-mining applications in many countries such as Australia, Japan and the United States.

Josh is the Co-Founder and CTO of Lymbix Inc, the Canadian company known for having developed ToneCheck: the add-in designed to prevent people from sending the wrong message in email. Fueling ToneCheck is Lymbix' Sentiment Intelligence: revolutionizing the space of sentiment analysis. Josh is the driving force and visionary behind the intelligence technology being developed to fuel the suite of real-world applications under the Lymbix umbrella.

Originally from Toronto, Josh made the decision to relocate to New Brunswick in 2008 to concentrate his full efforts on Lymbix. Currently he divides his time between New Brunswick and San Francisco.

Prior to Lymbix, he led a Ruby on Rails practice building customized software applications for other businesses. Josh holds a degree in Computer/Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick.

Israel runs the Emerging Media and Technology group for Porter Novelli, focusing on developing robust strategic digital analytics and commercially relevant technology to put Porter Novelli clients ahead of the competition and drive outstanding results. Most recently before joining Porter Novelli, Israel led marketing for (x+1), a major display optimization company. Before that he was chief strategy officer for NOM, managing and executing successful online marketing campaigns involving micro-sharing, social aggregation, social media and digital word-of-mouth for clients.

Israel earned a B.A. and a B.S. in English and computer science from Williams College.

Amit Moran is R&D Manager at Aol Relegence team (Tel-Aviv, Israel). Relegence team is responsible for developing algorithms that power and enhance Aol's content platform capabilities and user experience. Using IR, NLP, Machine Learning and other tools to extract and analyze the web.

Amit holds a M.Sc. in Physics from Tel-Aviv University

Katie Delahaye Paine (twitter: @KDPaine) is the CEO and founder of KDPaine & Partners LLC and author of two books, Measure What Matters (Wiley, March 2011) and Measuring Public Relationships, the Data-Driven Communicators Guide to Measuring Success (KDPaine & Partners 2007) She also writes the first blog and the first newsletters dedicated entirely to measurement and accountability. In the last two decades, she and her firm have listened to millions of conversations, analyzed thousands of articles, and asked hundreds of question in order to help her organizations better understand their relationships with their constituencies.

Stephen D. (Steve) Rappaport, ARF Knowledge Solutions Director, creates the knowledge resources, tools and services which help members build brands. Listen First! draws upon his decades of experience in listening for market research and for creating listening-based business strategy, services and companies. Listening grabbed Steve in academia, where he trained under a number of distinguished professors who pioneered media content analysis, and then brought that to business to include in his toolkit for consumer and B2B research, strategy and planning. Steve advises companies as diverse as Campbell, Toyota, Warner Bros., and Kaiser Permanente, and keynotes, speaks, panels or leads workshops at conferences such as the World Federation of Advertisers, Mobile Marketing Association, and ARF. Listen First! is his second book published by John Wiley & Sons under the auspices of the ARF. Steve was the lead author of the best-selling The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from the Advertising Research Foundation (Wiley 2007).

Karla Wachter joined Waggener Edstrom Worldwide in 1999 and currently leads the company's Insight and Analytics practice and product development efforts, within the WE Studio D group. In this capacity, Karla is responsible for Waggener Edstrom Worldwide's family of insight and analytics tools, such as twendztm and twendz protm, and services across a spectrum of online and offline influence channels. Through a deep understanding of influence, the highly skilled researchers and analysts provide insight into Waggener Edstrom's client's audiences, brand awareness and perception and show the clear impact of communications campaigns on a company's brand through delivery of actionable insights and analysis. Prior to Karla's leadership in the WE Studio D group, she led Waggener Edstrom Worldwide's public relations efforts for multiple business groups on the Microsoft account.

Yongzheng Zhang has been with eBay Research Labs in San Jose, CA since May 2006. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist working on e-Commerce R&D projects. His research interests are in the areas of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Web Mining, particularly centered on Web Document Summarization. He has published several journal and conference articles on Web site summarization, automatic term extraction, and Opinion Mining. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dalhousie University, Canada in October 2007.

Shane Axtell is a Computational Linguist with Clarabridge. He oversees Clarabridge's sentiment analysis and linguistic capabilities. Before joining Clarabridge, Shane worked as a Grammarian for Janya, Inc., which provides text and semantic processing for businesses and law enforcement agencies. Shane received his B.A. in theoretical linguistics from Brigham Young University and his M.S. in computational linguistics from SUNY Buffalo.

Bell has been involved in the software industry for nearly 13 years helping build organizations focused on desktop training, search, automated metadata extraction, taxonomy creation, knowledge management and semantic technologies. He has an extensive background helping grow software companies including Teach.com, Autonomy, APR Smartlogik and Concept Searching. Bell has developed and executed sales, OEM and VAR strategies, reseller programs and other business development initiatives for a variety of companies across multiple industries at crucial points in their maturation processes. As the VP of Enterprise Solutions, Bell is responsible for developing a network of new partnerships with OEM's, value added resellers, system integrators and distributors while driving enterprise sales in order to increase the worldwide adoption of semantic technology within the global enterprise.

Currently Director of Product Management At NetBase driving new feature design. Prior to NetBase, Elliot was at Nielsen Online with the BuzzMetrics group where he was the designer of My BuzzMetrics - a social media monitoring platform. Prior to Nielsen Online, Elliot was the Senior Product Manager at EDGAR Online, a leading provider of financial data and associated analytic tools. Prior to EDGAR, Elliot played a number of product leadership roles at successful startups, including Praedea Solutions (acquired by Mergent Online) and Juice Software (acquired by Proclarity/Microsoft). Elliot began his career at Information Builders involved in areas of BI, data connectivity, expert systems software and data warehousing. Expertise areas also include:

• Text Processing, Analytics, and applications to machine learning
• Data warehousing/Business Intelligence

Richard Brown is the global business manager for the machine readable news program at Thomson Reuters, responsible for the product portfolio that includes its archive product, real-time feeds, and news analysis solutions. Prior to his work at Thomson Reuters, Mr. Brown co-founded and was the Chief Operating Officer at Foresight Research Solutions, LLC, a New York-based independent research firm and member of the NASD and SIPC. Prior to Foresight, Mr. Brown was a senior client manager for International Business Machines in New York. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Management and International Business from the Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business.

Lipika Dey is a Senior Consultant and Principal Scientist at Tata Consultancy Services, India. She heads the Text Analytics and Enterprise Search research group at Innovation Labs, Delhi. Her focus is on seamless integration of social intelligence and business intelligence. Lipika's research interests are in the areas of noisy text analytics, sentiment analysis and opinion mining, machine learning and semantic search of enterprise content. Lipika has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. Prior to joining Tata Consultancy Services in 2007, she was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi from 1995 to 2007. She has over 60 publications in International journals and refereed conference proceedings. She is a Programme Committee member for various International Conferences. Lipika is a co-chair for the upcoming Workshop on Analysis of Noisy Data (AND) to be held along with ICDAR at Beijing in September 2011.

Seth Earley has been implementing content management and knowledge management projects for over 14 years and has been in the technology field for 20 + years. He is founder of the Boston Knowledge Management Forum and co-author of Practical Knowledge Management from the IBM Press. He is former adjunct professor at Northeastern University, where he taught graduate courses in Knowledge Management Infrastructure and E Business Strategy. He was 2009 Co-Chair of the Metadata Committee, NDIIPP Education and Outreach for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Seth has developed search, content and knowledge strategies for global organizations and has developed underlying taxonomies for a diverse roster of Fortune 1000 companies. He is a popular speaker and workshop leader at conferences throughout North America speaking on intranet design, knowledge management, content management systems and strategy, taxonomy development and other related topics.

Marguerite Leenhardt is a PhD student at SYLED-CLA2T, a Textometry and Natural Language Processing department at Paris 3 University, France, and is currently doing her thesis in an industrial context, as an expert systems designer specialized in Opinion Mining and Applied Linguistics at Le Sémiopôle, a web agency's qualitative studies department. She graduated with double Masters Degree in Natural Language Processing and in Multilingual Engineering, specialized in conversational analysis. She is interested in the development of semantic search engines and opinion monitoring systems and has worked with Publicis Consultants | Net Intelligenz for designing an online survey application with semantic levels of qualification plus bringing news methods for qualitative studies.

Fiona McNeill oversees product marketing of text analytics at SAS. During her 12 year tenure, she has helped organizations derive tangible benefit from their strategic use of technology. In addition to her work with a wide range of industries, McNeill has defined product strategy, corporate relationships, and received multiple innovation awards. McNeill has published in academic journals, conducted education seminars and presented at both academic and industry conferences over the course of her career. She received her M.A. in Quantitative Behavioral Geography from McMaster University, and graduated cum laude with a B.Sc. in Bio-Physical Systems, University of Toronto.

Karo Moilanen is a computational linguist, completing a DPhil in Computer Science at Oxford University Computing Laboratory. His research focuses on various facets of sentiment and other forms of non-factuality in text using deep, knowledge-rich linguistic modelling and machine learning. He has been actively involved in industrial sentiment analysis and NLP work as a linguist (Powerset/Microsoft Search Labs) and as an NLP consultant in the UK, and is currently the NLP architect and lead developer at TheySay, an Oxford University spin-out company.

Steve Pettigrew has spent the last decade working on various computational linguistic projects at OpenText. Joining OpenText as a mathematician in 2001, Mr. Pettigrew decided to dedicate his passion for number theory to machine learning and applied text analytics. He was instrumental in designing multiple natural language processing algorithms, core to some of OpenText's patented technologies. Today, Steve has expanded his field of work in the domain of search, collective intelligence, advanced analytics and semantic web technologies.

Dr. Rafsky, who earned his Ph.D. in statistics from Yale in 1974 and his A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton in 1970, is a well-known innovator and entrepreneur in the on-line information industry.

He has led four successful new ventures, taking overall responsibility for securing funding, setting strategic direction, and building infrastructures.

In addition to his entrepreneurial activities, Dr. Rafsky maintains research interests in a number of technical fields, including multivariate data analysis, graphics, computational statistics, finance, and portfolio theory. Papers in finance and portfolio theory have appeared in Econometrica and Management Science. Papers in multivariate analysis and graphics have appeared in the Annals of Statistics and JASA (Journal of the American Statistical Association). Dr. Rafsky was co-recipient of the 1980 Theory and Methods Award from the American Statistical Association, has been an adjunct faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Stevens Institute, and an invited speaker at major universities (Carnegie Mellon, Yale, and others) and meetings (ASA, ComStat, and COMDEX).

Pete Snell has combined extensive technical and leadership experience as a Naval Officer, business manager, management consultant, writer, and instructor with 37,000 additional hours in R&D as an inventor of next generation organizational and cultural development technology. His psychographic software performs a sophisticated Myers-Briggs-like assessment of any electronic text (e-mails, letters, web postings, etc.) He graduated from Annapolis and received an MA from Central Michigan University.

Max Yankelevich is responsible for Strategic Technology Direction and Business Development at Freedom OSS. Mr. Yankelevich is a seasoned Architect with over 15 years of hands-on experience. Prior to joining Freedom OSS, Mr. Yankelevich worked for Fortune 500 companies, such as JP Morgan Chase, Credit Suisse, AIG, Deutsche Bank, ADP and Amerada Hess. Mr. Yankelevich holds a BA in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Taras Zagibalov heads up the NLP research team at Brandwatch, Europe's leading social media monitoring company. Taras made his name as an expert in NLP with various research projects in multilingual sentiment analysis, gaining him a doctorate in Informatics with his thesis on Unsupervised and knowledge-poor approaches to sentiment analysis. His research has consistently looked at sentiment analysis within several languages including Chinese, Japanese, Russian and English. Taras' work with Brandwatch is concerned with improving real-time sentiment analysis to deliver more accurate and up to date market information for some of the world's leading brands from multinational games companies to worldwide motor brands.