Search-Based Applications

At the Confluence of Search and Database Technologies

Gregory Grefenstette

Gregory Grefenstette is Chief Science Officer at Exalead. He received his B.S. from Stanford University in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1993. He has been Principal Scientist at the Xerox Research Centre (1993-2001), with Clairvoyance (2001-2003) and at the French applied research centre, the CEA (2001-2008). His research interests range from most subjects in Natural Language Processing to all aspects of Information Retrieval. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Natural Language Engineering, and he edited the first book on Cross Language Information Retrieval (Kluwer 1998).

Laura Wilber

Ms. Wilber is the former CEO and founder of California-based AVENCOM, Inc., a software development company specializing in online databases and database-driven Internet applications (acquired by Red Door Interactive in 2004), and she served as the VP of Marketing for Kintera, Inc., a provider of SaaS software to the nonprofit and government sectors. She has also developed multimedia courtroom tutorials for technology-related intellectual property litigation for Legal Arts Multimedia, LLC. Ms. Wilber earned an M.A. from the University of Maryland, where she was also a candidate in the PhD program, before joining the federal systems engineering division of Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) in Washington, DC. Ms. Wilber currently works as a technology analyst and writer at Exalead, SA, a global provider of search and information access software. Prior to joining Exalead, Ms. Wilber taught Business Process Reengineering, Management of Information Systems and E-Commerce at ISG (l’Institut Supérieur de Gestion) in Paris.