Symposium Speakers

Elizabeth Baran, Computational Linguist, Lexalytics

Elizabeth Baran is a Computational Linguist at Lexalytics and is currently developing a native language pack for Mandarin Chinese. She is fluent in English, Chinese (Mandarin), and French. She holds a BA from Georgetown University in Chinese, with a double-minor in French and Linguistics. She also holds a Master's degree from Brandeis University in Computational Linguistics, where she was a member of the Chinese Natural Language Processing Group and did research that dealt with deciphering noun number and the temporal properties of verbs in Chinese. Elizabeth loves languages and has lived and studied in both China and France for extended periods of time.

Hal Bloom, VP, Market Research, Sage

Hal Bloom is the head of the market research team responsible for providing strategic direction to the corporation by designing, conducting and analyzing all market research for Sage North America. Hal has over 35 years of domestic and international expertise in all aspects of marketing research, long range strategic planning, new business development and customer loyalty in Fortune 500 companies including Coca-Cola, Pillsbury, Tupperware, and Grey Advertising.

Amelia Burke-Garcia, Senior Director of Digital Media, Westat, @socialibriumm

Amelia Burke-Garcia, MA, is Westat's senior director of digital media and brings with her almost 10 years of experience in digital media. In addition to providing digital media technical assistance to campaigns across the company, Amelia is also currently the Project Director for CDC's National Influenza Vaccination Campaign. Before joining Westat, she served as director of digital media at AED, and prior to that as the Social Media Group Supervisor for Horizon Media's Social Media team. Amelia is the author of the S.O.C.I.A.L. framework for planning and evaluating digital media campaigns, the author of The Socialibriumm Experiment blog, and has been published in PRNews's 2012 Measurement Guidebook. She has a Master's degree from Georgetown University and a Bachelor's degree from McGill University.

Ronen Feldman, Associate Professor, Hebrew University, and Co-founder, Digital Trowel

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.

Seth Grimes, President and Principal Consultant, Alta Plana Corporation, @SethGrimes

Seth Grimes is an information-technology strategy consultant with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation. He is founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit and Sentiment Analysis Symposium. He is a long-time InformationWeek contributor and writes for several business and technology outlets. 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.

Carol Haney, VP, Product Marketing, Toluna, @carolsuehaney

Carol Haney is vice president of product marketing at market-research firm Toluna. She formerly led the development of Harris Interactive's Research Lifestreaming, a panelist-based approach to social media monitoring. At Harris, Carol was VP of Public Affairs & Policy and developed solutions for clients such as the CDC, HHS, and others. At the CDC, she helped reduce critical cycle time by 60% for outbreak data collection. She has held management postions at SPSS and NORC at the University of Chicago. At NORC, she developed a speedy mechanism for pulling and marking area probability sample from the national U.S. Census frame. Carol is an expert reviewer for CASRO's social media privacy guidelines.

Catherine Havasi, CEO, Luminoso, @havasi, @LuminosoInsight

Dr. Catherine Havasi co-founded and runs Luminoso, a text analytics and understanding company. She is also a group leader and researcher in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics at the MIT Media Lab, where she runs the Digital Intuition group. Twelve years ago, she co-founded the Open Mind Common Sense project, which uses crowdsourced information about the world to understand natural language text and make computers easier to use.

Joseph Hughes, Senior Executive, Accenture, @jphughes3

Joe Hughes is the Managing Director of Accenture’s Global Enterprise Social Media & Text Analytics Systems Integration practice. A recognized thought leader in the area of agent desktop optimization, customer service and Social CRM. Joe offers ove 20 years of experience as a technology architect for global technical solutions across various industries. An original OO and Internet pioneer in CRM, Joe is regularly invited to speak at various CRM conferences and industry forums. Most recently he has blogged in The Social Customer and is a chapter author in The Social Media Management Handbook, Wiley 2011, as well as a judge of Paul Greenberg's CRM Idol competition. Joe has a A.B. in Economics from Harvard University and a Masters in Business Science Information Technology from Johns Hopkins University

	Gary Kazantsev, Bloomberg
	Gary Kazantsev runs the R&D Machine Learning group at Bloomberg LP, leading projects in the areas of computational linguistics and machine learning such as sentiment analysis, market impact indicators, machine translation, text classification and predictive modeling of financial markets. He holds degrees in physics, mathematics and computer science from Boston University.

Han-Sheong Lai, PayPal, @lhs8

Han-Sheong Lai, the Director of Customer Advocacy & Text Analytics at PayPal, focuses on advocating and driving simple customer focus culture, operatinal excellence principles and practices on customer experience, business process improvement, defects elimination and innovation at PayPal. He is building a set of capabilities at PayPal to use text and sentiment analytics to better and more quickly understand PayPal's large number of customers and feed those insights to various teams such as Products, Technology, Pricing and Marketing. Han received his BS in engineering from the University of New South Wales, Australia, and his MBA from the Athens Laboratory of Business Administration, Greece. He has co-authored an award-wining case study on e-commerce.

Seth McGuire, Gnip, @@sethmcguire

Seth McGuire is the Director of Business Development at Gnip, Inc. in Boulder, CO. Founded in 2008, Gnip is the leading provider of real-time social media data for enterprise applications ranging from hedge funds to social media monitoring firms and business intelligence companies. Gnip aggregates and delivers ready-to-consume data (over 100 Billion social activities a month!) from dozens of social media sites, including Twitter, StockTwits, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and forums. Seth previously managed research and sales for the Corporate Executive Board, a D.C. based best-practices consulting firm serving Fortune 1000 clients. Following that, he completed an MBA at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Erin Olivo, Clinical Psychologist, SmogFarm

Dr. Erin Olivo is a clinical psychologist whose clinical and research work focuses on the use of mind-body strategies in both medical and mental health settings. Formerly the Director of the Columbia Integrative Medicine Program, her primary research interest is the investigation of the efficacy and safety of integrative therapies used to enhance health, prevent illness or manage symptoms of disease. Dr. Olivo holds master's degrees in both Public Health and Social Work from Columbia University. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University.

David Rabjohns, CEO, MotiveQuest

David Rabjohns is the CEO of MotiveQuest, a social intelligence company. MotiveQuest uses "Online Anthropology" software to help companies create new products, improve their marketing and measure their success. Key clients include:, Microsoft, Kraft, Novartis and Audi. Prior to starting MotiveQuest in 2003, David was the youngest ever account planning EVP at Leo Burnett. David has also worked in marketing and strategy positions at IBM (UK), PepsiCo (Aus), Saatchi & Saatchi (UK) and McConnaughy (US). David enjoys sailing, racing cars and travel (he once rode a motorcycle from Sydney to London). He spends his spare time wrangling his two boys, James & Hugh.

Steve Rappaport, Knowledge Solutions Director, the Advertising Research Foundation, @steverappaport

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).

Augie Ray, social media strategist, a Fortune 100 firm, @AugieRay

Augie Ray is Director of Social Media Strategy at a Fortune 100 financial-services firm. Previously, he was with USAA as Executive Director of Community and Collaboration and Forrester as the research firm's lead west coast analyst covering social media and interactive marketing. While at USAA, Augie delivered USAA's first social business roadmap, defining the ways social technologies and behaviors are changing business models within the financial service industry. At Forrester, Augie wrote widely read reports on social media trends and strategies and consulted with Fortune 500 firms on processes, best practices and metrics. While at Forrester, Augie was frequently quoted on social media developments by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other news outlets. Augie maintains a blog at ExperienceTheBlog.com.

Sean Reckwerdt, Lead Analyst & Cultural Anthropologist, Networked Insights, @sreckwerdt

Sean Reckwerdt is the Lead Analyst and Cultural Anthropologist at Networked Insights and uses their marketing decisions platform to deliver real-time insights to innovative brands, TV networks, and film studios. Sean is an accredited cultural theorist from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and has lead for the past 3 years Networked Insights real-time analysis of the Upfronts and the new show premieres. His TV data and analysis has been published in many leading publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Advertising Age, and AdWeek.

Philip Resnik, Professor, University of Maryland, @psresnik

Philip Resnik is a professor at the University of Maryland, holding joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics and at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Dr. Resnik's research focuses on combining knowledge-based and statistical methods for natural language processing, with applications in machine and crowdsourced translation and in computational social science. Outside academia, he serves as a language technology advisor for 3M Health Information Systems and as lead scientist for Converseon, and he is commercializing React Labs, a new mobile framework for real-time polling.

Martin Salo, Product Director and Co-Founder, Realeyes, @salomartin

At heart, Martin Salo is a technologist, writing his first lines of code at the tender age of 7! At the ripe old age of 12, he wrote an app that was downloaded by tens of thousands of people. Shortly after that, Martin got the entrepreneurial bug and launched a creative agency. He has also been the CIO at two companies. Having over 200 web projects under his belt has enabled Martin to successfully develop Realeyes emotion measurement platform into a world leading offering.

Lindsey Sanford, Social Media Analyst, Bernard Hodes Group, @LindseySanford

Lindsey works as a Social Media Analyst for Bernard Hodes Group. She specializes in: Social Media Content Creation and Strategy, Social Media Community Management, and Monitoring and Analyzing Online Employer Reputation. She trains Fortune 500 organizations to create content, where to find inspiration for continuous production, and how to track and measure results through data to further inspire strategy. She finished a dual degree in English (Writing) and Speech Communications from the University of Nevada and started her career in Politics. Her passions include big data, data analysis for strategy inspiration, and public speaking.

Julie Wittes Schlack, Senior VP Innovation and Design, Communispace, @jwschlack

One of the founding members of Communispace Corporation, Julie has been instrumental in designing and continually evolving Communispace's online community offering. By day, she leads an Innovation and Research Group whose mission is to uncover new patterns and trends in online community behavior and test new techniques and technologies for engaging people in online communities and social networks. By night she is a book reviewer and published author of fiction and narrative non-fiction. And 24 hours a day, she is a devoted fan of storytelling and meaning-making in all of its myriad forms.

Stuart Shulman, Vice President for Text Analytics, Vision Critical, @stuartwshulman

Dr. Stuart W. Shulman is Vice President for Text Analytics at Vision Critical. Stu is a political science professor, software inventor, entrepreneur, and garlic growing enthusiast who coaches U11 boys club soccer for FC Massachusetts with a national D-license. He is the founder & CEO of Texifter, LLC, Director of QDAP-UMass, and Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics. Stu is the proud owner of a Bernese/Shepherd named "Colbert" who goes by 'Bert. You can follow his exploits @stuartwshulman or @DiscoverText.

V.S. Subrahmanian, Professor, University of Maryland

V.S. Subrahmanian is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Director of the Center for Digital International Government (CDIG), and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics (LCCD) at the University of Maryland. From 2004 to 2010, he was Director of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland. His research is at the intersection of databases, artificial intelligence, and optimization methods with applications to tracking, monitoring and forecasting behaviors of terrorist groups, socio-cultural groups, global health care, and other areas relevant to most human beings.

Research & Innovation Presenters

	Jennifer Carlson, Scientist, Decisive Analytics Corporation
	Jennifer Carlson is a Research Scientist in Natural Language Processing at Decisive Analytics Corporation. She holds a master's degree in computational linguistics and a graduate certificate in cognitive science from the University of Colorado, Boulder where she managed annotations for the VerbNet and Chinese VerbNet projects.

Kyle Dent, Senior Researcher, Palo Alto Research Center, @kdent

Kyle Dent is a member of the research staff at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, formerly Xerox PARC), working in the Knowledge, Language, and Interaction area of the Intelligent Systems Lab. His work tries to improve humans' relationship with large quantities of information drawing on many approaches such as text retrieval, natural language processing, statistical analysis, and visualization to help people find and understand information relevant to them at a given point in time and within a particular context. He tries to solve problems of sensemaking, information overload, and understanding.

Samuel R Dismond III, Chief Scientist, 7INSIDE, Inc.

Samuel R Dismond III has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business through a full-tuition Kaiser Family Fellowship; an MD from the University of Michigan Medical School through a full tuition scholarship; and a BS Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame du Lac as a National Achievement and Du Lac Scholar. He is the Creator of the Inner Experience Semantic Network (IESN) and the Terma. He is a self-taught expert ECMA4 script programmer and MySQL database designer. He hand-coded the 10,000+ nodes comprising the IESN. Each node is an English expression redefined utilizing a novel semantic primitive that anchors utterance in one or more universal inner experiences. He designed and created the Terma - a recursive engine that reduces topic-specific utterances to archive-specific equal-length vectors based on the degree of IESN class participation. He is an avid practitioner of Yi Quan Chi Gong.

Zornitsa Kozareva, Research Assistant Professor, University of Southern California, Information Sciences

Dr. Zornitsa Kozareva is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California and a Research Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute. Her research interests lie in sentiment analysis, large-scale knowledge acquisition, lexical semantics and information extraction. She is currently the Co-PI of the IARPA project "MICS: Metaphor Interpretation for Cultural Schemas," the goal of which is to build a multilingual system capable of detecting and interpreting metaphors. Zornitsa received her PhD with Cum Laude from the University of Alicante, Spain where she worked on multilingual information extraction. Zornitsa has organized four SemEval challenges and workshops on sentiment analysis, paraphrases, relation identification and causality.

Richard K. Merritt, Professor, Luther College

Richard K. Merritt is Professor of Art at Luther College in Decorah Iowa where he teaches intermedia, critical theory and computational aesthetics. His most recent research includes: Visual Models for Algorithm and Software Design, The Arts of Memory and the Design of Influence, Concept Visualization, and Designing haptic interfaces. Professor Merritt has lectured and exhibited nationally and internationally and has published in Leonardo Journal of Arts and Sciences of the MIT press as well as publications and proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

Alessandro Oltramari, Scientific Consultant, B-Sm@rk

Alessandro Oltramari is a Researcher in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA). He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at the University of Trento (Italy), in co-tutorship with the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (ISTC-CNR). He's author of about fifty publications in Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Management. He used to be a co-organizer of the OntoLex workshops from 2004 to 2010. Alessandro is Scientific Consultant of B-Sm@rk since 2011.

Claudio Pinhanes, Manager, Service Systems Research, IBM Research - Brazil

Claudio Pinhanez is a researcher, professor, and media artist. He is the leader of the Service Systems Research group of IBM Research-Brazil, where he has been a research scientist since 2009, working on Social Networks, Social Media Analytics, Service Science, Ubiquitous Computing, and Human-Computer Interfaces. Claudio got his PhD. in 1999 from the MIT Media Laboratory, and was a researcher at the T.J. Watson laboratory of IBM Research from 1999 to 2009.

Vasudeva Varma, Professor/Chief Scientist, IIIT Hyderabad/SETU Software, @devvarma

Vasudeva Varma is a faculty member at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad Since 2002. His research interests include search (information retrieval), information extraction, information access, cloud computing and software engineering. He is heading Search and Information Extraction Lab at IIIT Hyderabad. He is also the chair of Post Graduate Programs since 2009. He published a book on Software Architecture (Pearson Education) and over hundred and fifty technical papers in journals and conferences. In 2004, he obtained young scientist award and grant from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, for his proposal on personalized search engines. In 2007, he was given Research Faculty Award by AOL Labs. He co-founded SETU Software Systems Pvt Ltd, a technology start-up along with Dr. Prasad Pingali which is focused on solving information access problems using unstructured data analytics. He was visiting professor at UPV, Valencia, Spain (Summer 2007), UBO, Bretagne, France (Summer 2009) and Language Technologies Institute, CMU, Pittsburgh, USA (Summer 2010).

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