Stanley Peters, Chief Linguist
Stanley Peters’s main work focuses on logical analysis of meaning in natural languages and computational processing thereof, including mathematical theories of natural and computing languages. Peters has been a professor of linguistics at Stanford since 1983, and served as chair of the department from 1996 to 2002. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently heads the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), which he previously directed from 1987 to 1990. He also leads CSLI’s Computational Semantics Laboratory. Peters has published extensively, with over a hundred publications in journals and at conferences. He has also served on the boards and committees of a range of journals, including Linguistic Inquiry, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Journal of Logic, Language, and Information. He has received Fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
David Israel, Scientific Advisor
Dr. David Israel (SRI) has over 30 years of research experience in both Natural Language Processing and Reasoning and Representation. He has played major leadership roles in several large DARPA Programs. He is currently Principal Investigator of SRI’s Machine Reading Team and Senior Scientific Advisor to SRI’s Bootstrapped Learning Team. Previously, he had been Chief Scientist of the CALO Project (the largest AI project in DARPA’s history), PrincipaI Investigator for SRI’s GALE Team and was PI of both phases of the large Learning by Reading seedling that was a direct predecessor of the current Machine Reading Program.
David Israel graduated from Harvard College and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.
Stephanie Sarka, Business Advisor
Stephanie Sarka is a seasoned entrepreneur and leader, with deep experience in building businesses and brands. She was a founding executive of Overture (formerly GoTo), the successful Internet company which invented and pioneered the Pay-for-Performance (paid) search business model in early 1998, growing the company to ~$1 bn revenues in four years. The company went public in 1999 and was sold to Yahoo in 2003 for $1.6 bn.
Prior to Overture, Stephanie led the re-launch and turn-around of Mark Cross, the American luxury goods brand, and held numerous leadership positions at Coach Leatherware, the pre-eminent American accessories brand. Stephanie has also worked for Advent International (VC) in London and International Flavors & Fragrances in Paris, and she spent two years in the Mergers & Acquisitions group of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York City at the beginning of her career.
Over the past few years, Stephanie has been a leader, investor, advisor or board member for numerous start-up and turn-around ventures (large and small) in New York City, Silicon Valley, London and China, including as a key executive on the turn-around team for the NYC Department of Education Public School Reform, where she led the «SchoolFood Revolution», architecting and implementing the successful head-to-toe turn-around of the $500 mm,
Stephanie is currently the Founder & CEO of a new Internet venture where they are building the foundation for the next generation of social networking.
Stephanie has a BA in quantitative economics from Stanford and her MBA from Harvard Business School.
Peter Burke, Business Advisor
Peter is a seasoned technology executive with extensive experience of enterprise software product development in the telecommunications and high tech sectors. He currently holds the position of VP Product Management, Software Products for Motorola Mobility and recently served as Executive Vice President of Product Development for InQuira (acquired by Oracle). InQuira, a leader in the Knowledge Management space, makes extensive use of NLP-based search, content management and analytics. Prior to InQuira, he served as CEO of Ceon where he refocused the company and established it as the market leader in the fast growing PLM for Converged Service Operators market prior to the company being acquired by Convergys. He subsequently served as VP/GM of the Convergys PLM Business Unit.
Peter also held senior engineering and management positions at IBM and British Telecommunications. He is an expert in Artificial Intelligence, telecommunications, image processing and product development. He has published over 20 articles on computer- related topics and earned his BSc (Hons) and PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Strathclyde in the United Kingdom