i-fest Keynote Address

SIS is pleased to announce that Raul Valdes-Perez, Chief Executive Officer, Vivísimo, will be the keynote speaker at the i-fest.pitt.edu luncheon.  The luncheon and presentation will take place on Thursday, November 9th, at 12:00 noon in the Ballroom of the William Pitt Union.  Dr. Valdes-Perez will discuss the successful company’s founding, innovative information search products, and the challenges in the search industry.

Vivísimo was originally founded in 2000 by three Carnegie Mellon University scientists (including Valdes-Perez) who decided to tackle the problem of information overload in web searches by developing new technology to organize unwieldy search results in a completely innovative way. They used a mathematical algorithm and deep linguistic knowledge to find relationships between search terms and bring them to light. Over the years, the company has built upon the original technology of document clustering with the same guiding principle of using technology to help users conquer information overload and harness the true power of search. 

Dr. Valdes-Perez has led Vivísimo since its inception. During his tenure, he has been recognized as a top ten reader favorite for entrepreneur of the year by Inc. magazine, a CEO of the year finalist by the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and three times as one of the fifty most important Hispanics in business and technology by Hispanic Engineer magazine. Before Vivísimo, Valdes-Perez was on the Carnegie Mellon University computer science department faculty since 1991; he is now an adjunct associate professor. His research on new methods and applications of knowledge discovery led to publishing nearly 50 journal articles in natural, social and computer science. He was a principal investigator on six grants from the National Science Foundation, served on its advisory committee for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, and was an action editor of the journal Machine Learning. Raul received a Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon and B.S. and M.S. degrees in information engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.