Norvig Web Data Science Award

Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. At Google Inc he was the Director of Search Quality, responsible for the core web search algorithms from 2002-2005, and has been a Director of Research from 2005 on.

Previously he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA’s senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He was co-teacher of an Artifical Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world’s longest palindromic sentence.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Research for Europe and Latin America, leading the Yahoo! Research labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, and also supervising the lab in Haifa, Israel. Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School of the University of Chile; and ICREA Professor and founder of the Web Research Group at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He maintains ties with both mentioned universities as a part-time professor for the Ph.D. program. 

His research interests includes algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, web data mining, and data visualization.

He is ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow, and co-author of Modern Information Retrieval (Addison Wesley, 2011)

Hilary Mason

I believe technology should give us superpowers.

I’m the Chief Scientist at bitly, where we study attention on the internet in real time, doing a mix of research, exploration, and engineering.

I co-founded HackNY, a non-profit that helps talented engineering students find their way into the startup community of creative technologists in New York City.

I’m an enthusiastic member of the larger conspiracy to evolve the emerging discipline of data science.

I’m a native New Yorker and I love this city and the technology community here.

I am an advisor to a few organizations that I adore, including knod.es, collective[i], and DataKind. I’m a mentor to Betaspring, the Providence, Rhode Island-based startup accelerator, and TechStars New York.

I’m a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Technology and Innovation Advisory Council, which has been a fascinating way to learn how government and industry can work together.

I’ve received a few honors this year, like the TechFellows Engineering Leadership award, and was on the Forbes 40 under 40 Ones to Watch list and Crain’s New York 40 under Forty list. I’ve also been in Glamour, Fast Company, Scientific American, and more, which has made my mother very happy.

I like to give talks, and have spoken about how to replace yourself with a very small shell script, on e-mail hacking, machine learning: a love story, and more.

Jimmy Lin

I'm an associate professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland, with appointments in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and the Department of Computer Science. I joined the faculty in August 2004, shortly after completing my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and was promoted to associate professor in March 2009.

I work on "big data", with a particular focus on large-scale distributed algorithms for text processing. My research lies at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR). I'm a member of both the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab (CLIP) and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL).

Evert Lammerts

I joined SURFsara in October 2008, and am currently leading the Hadoop and related big data services team. I’m also the organiser of the Dutch Hadoop User Group, and I occasionally lecture on things related to big data. I’m also the tech lead for the Dutch branch of the LifeWatch biodiversity research facilities.

Before joining SURFsara I lived in Hungary for four years, where I finished my studies Software Engineering at MTA SZTAKI. During those years I also worked as a short-term expert for the Dutch ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management, and Fisheries, in a Twinning project with our counterpart ministry in Belgrade, Serbia.