Founders



Jonathan Siddharth

Jonathan Siddharth graduated with a Masters with Distinction in Research in Computer Science from Stanford University. He was awarded the Christofer Stephenson Memorial Award for Graduate Research for Best Masters Thesis at Stanford University for his work on Near Duplicate Detection in Web Pages. At Stanford, Jonathan worked with Dr.Andreas Paepcke and Prof.Hector Garcia Molina of the Stanford InfoLab on problems of Context Driven Ranking for Search, Passage retrieval for Web Search, Supervised Web Page Classification and Near Duplicate Detection in Web pages which subsequently led to a publication in SIGIR'08.
Jonathan's primary focus of research has been applications of Machine Learning for learning & optimizing Ranking functions & algorithms for Web Search. Jonathan worked briefly at Powerset, where he was one of the scientists behind the initial ranking algorithms powering the Natural Language Search Engine. His work at Powerset with the Ranking group, involved developing & improving the ranking func tion by exploiting various features derived from deep linguistic processing, semantic analysis, traditional keyword based analysis & Web graph information.
Jonathan's undergraduate degree was from SVCE,(Anna University), Madras in Computer Science and Engineering where he graduated at the top of his graduating class in 2005. His undergraduate research publications spanned applications of Artificial Intelligence for driving cars & medical diagnosis. When he's not thinking about Web Search (and sometimes when he is) he occasionally writes on his blog, Searching for A.I.


Vijay Krishnan

Vijay Krishnan received his Masters in Computer Science at Stanford University where his research focused on Data/Text/Web Mining, Machine Learning and Web Search. At Stanford, Vijay worked on applying Machine Learning to the problem of Named Entity Recognition, which is an important problem in Information Retrieval and Extraction. This led to a publication in the COLING-ACL 2006 proceedings. He also worked on the problem of web spam detection by analyzing hyperlinks, which led to a publication in the AirWeb workshop at SIGIR 2006.
Vijay worked at Yahoo! Inc in summer 2006 and briefly in 2007 and worked on the automated classification of queries, ads and webpages into large taxonomies with several thousand categories. Vijay developed novel methods for fast and accurate classification that were also extremely efficient by way of having a very small memory footprint thereby making them very easy to load into main memory and deploy. He has filed a patent for the same titled "Method for Efficiently Building Compact Models for Large Multi-Class Text Classification". His classifiers substantially improved on the existing systems at Yahoo and in turn led to improvements in many products related to Search Relevance, Data Insights, Advertisement Matching and targeting.
Vijay received his Undergraduate and Masters degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. His research thesis on Automated Question Answering was published at HLT-EMNLP 2005, while his work on mathematical modeling of document corpora modeling was published at SIGIR 2005. His research on Privacy Preserving Data Mining was published at DASFAA 2004.



Advisors



Martin Lefebvre

Martin Lefebvre began his electrical engineering career in 1982 as a circuit designer for Bell-Northern Research, now Nortel Networks. After seven years at Nortel, Martin became a professor with the Department of Electronics of Carleton University, in Ottawa, where, over a five year period, he supervised a group of fifteen graduate students and research engineers developing computer aided design tools for the physical design of integrated circuits. In 1994, Martin left Carleton and founded Cadabra Design Automation, an EDA company selling design and manufacturing software to leading semiconductor suppliers worldwide. Following the 2001 acquisition of Cadabra by Numerical Technologies, a Nasdaq listed company, Martin served as Senior Vice President of Numerical (which is now part of Synopsys, Inc.), responsible for the Cadabra Business Unit. In 2003, he was appointed Executive in Residence with the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. He was most recently Chairman and CEO of CommandCAD, a Berkeley spin-off company which was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 2007. He currently serves as Chairman of Infoaxe, Inc., a Stanford University spin-off company operating in the consumer Web space. Martin is also an angel Investor with the Band of Angels and also serves on its member selection committee.
Martin received a B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, summa cum laude, from the University of Ottawa, in 1982, M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronics from Carleton University, Ottawa, in 1986 and 1989, respectively. He completed the Advanced Education Program from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, in 2002.


David Scacco

David Scacco joined Google in early 2000 (serving through 2007) and holds the distinction as the company's first advertising sales executive. In his role as Director of the Vertical Markets Group, David was responsible for building and managing an all-star team, which provided marketers with industry specific expertise across 12 macro categories including Travel, Finance, Consumer Packaged Goods, B2B Technology, and Agencies. In this capacity Scacco and the Vertical team built successful advertising partnerships with many of the world's best known brands and advertising agencies, as well as some of the fastest growing medium-sized companies.
Prior to joining Google, David was Director of Business Development at Ziff-Davis where he created integrated cross media marketing partnerships with leading Tech and Telecom marketers. Prior to that Scacco spent 7 years with a direct response computer reseller where he held the position of VP of Marketing. David began his career in ad agency account management. David holds a BS from Northern Illinois University.


Hector Garcia-Molina

Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He was the chairman of the Computer Science Department from January 2001 to December 2004. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). From August 1994 to December 1997 he was the Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford. From 1979 to 1991 he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include distributed computing systems, digital libraries and database systems. He received a BS in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1974. From Stanford University, Stanford, California, he received in 1975 a MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer science in 1979. Garcia-Molina is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; received the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award; is on the Technical Advisory Board of DoCoMo Labs USA, Yahoo Search & Marketplace; is a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle and Kintera.


Anil Dharni

Anil Dharni is the VP of products and UED at hi5 Networks, Inc., where he drives the product roadmap and key product initiatives. Anil works closely with hi5's engineering team to deliver new features and services from concept to launch for hi5's members globally. Most recently, Anil was co-founder of an Internet based knowledge-sharing community for college students, where he led a pilot of his company's offering at 10 universities. Previously, he served in product management roles at Yahoo! and held consulting and engineering roles at Wipro, Ariba, and Engineering Animation. Shortly after completing his undergraduate in engineering, Anil founded and sold a Company that provided a collaborative workflow management software tool. Anil holds a B.E. in aeronautical engineering from Punjab University and an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management (where he was co-president of both the MIT Venture Capital Club and MIT Innovation Club).


David Wu

David is currently Vice President, Small Business Group at Intuit, Inc. His responsiblities include delivering a unified Web offering to small business customers, including the QuickBooks Online, Homestead, JumpUp, StepUp, and MyCorporation services. and also to manage Product Management, Product Development, Experience Design, and IT teams. David was previously COO, Chief Product Officer/Senior VP, Products at Homestead Technologies Inc., leading the team which launched the first version of the company's award winning SiteBuilder software. David was responsible for the company's day to day operations, and has managed the development, finance, product, sales, support, and systems teams. He was responsible for all day to day operations of the 150 employee internet company, including operations reviews, cross-functional management, and product strategy and also served as acting CFO. His almost two decades of experience in the computer and Internet industries include positions at Synopsys and Scitor Corporation, where he led the team behind InfoWorld's 1996 Product of the Year. He holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. degree in Economics from Stanford University.


About the team - About Infoaxe - Infoaxe is Hiring!

©2008 Infoaxe, Inc.