Biographical sketches of authors

Robert Mack IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, N.Y., 10532 (robertmack@us.ibm.com). Dr. Mack is a research staff member at the IBM Watson Research lab. He received his Ph.D. degree in cognitive and experimental psychology at the University of Michigan in 1981. He has worked on a wide range of software systems, both as a user-interface and human-computer-interaction specialist, and as a project leader for prototype systems and middleware for applications relating to digital libraries, digital video archive and search, and knowledge portals. Dr. Mack and his team are currently working on applying text mining to support knowledge discovery in life science.

Sougata Mukherjea IBM Research Division, India Research Lab., Block 1, IIT Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India 110017 (smukherj@in.ibm.com). Dr. Mukherjea is a research staff member at the IBM India Research Lab. He received a bachelor's degree from Jadavpur University in Calcutta, a master's degree from Northeastern University in Boston, and a Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta (all in computer science). Before joining IBM, he held research and software architecture positions in companies in the Silicon Valley (California) including NEC USA, BEA Systems, and Verity. His research interests include information visualization and retrieval and applications of text mining in areas such as Web search and bioinformatics.

Aya Soffer IBM Research Division, Haifa Research Laboratory, University Campus, Haifa, Israel 31905 (ayas@il.ibm.com). Dr. Soffer is a research staff member at the IBM Research Lab in Haifa, Israel, where she manages the Information Retrieval group. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1992 and 1995, respectively. Before joining IBM, Dr. Soffer was a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she worked on digital libraries for earth science data. Her research interests include information retrieval, pictorial information systems, multidimensional indexing, and non-traditional database systems. Dr. Soffer and her group have developed several knowledge management solutions for IBM and Lotus products, among them the WebSphere* Portal's search engine.

Naohiko Uramoto IBM Research Division, Tokyo Research Laboratory, 1623-14, Shimotsuruma, Yamato, Kanagawa, Japan (uramoto@jp.ibm.com). Dr. Uramoto joined the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory in 1990 after receiving a master's degree in computer science from Kyushu University. He received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Kyushu University in 1990. He has been a visiting associate professor at the National Institute of Informatics since 2000. His research interests include natural language processing, text mining, XML and meta-data, and information integration.

Eric Brown IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, N.Y., 10532 (ewb@us.ibm.com). Dr. Brown is a research staff member at the Watson Research Center. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Vermont and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, all in computer science. Dr. Brown joined IBM in 1995 and conducts research in a variety of information-retrieval and text-analysis areas, including parallel and distributed information retrieval, question answering, text categorization, applications of speech recognition in knowledge management, and text analysis and search for biomedical text.

Anni Coden IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, N.Y., 10532 (anni@us.ibm.com). Dr. Coden is a research staff member at the Watson Research Center. She received her Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981 and continued there as a research scientist. She joined the IBM Research Division in 1982, and has worked in various areas of computer science. She started her career in developing tools for computer chip design and continued her work in IBM's anti-virus project. More recently, she worked on algorithms and systems in the area of digital multimedia libraries and on analyzing and searching speech transcripts in real-time video systems. Her current investigations are in the area of automatically analyzing medical records for knowledge discovery.

James Cooper IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, N.Y., 10532 (jwcnmr@us.ibm.com). Dr. Cooper is a research staff member at the Watson Research Center, where he studies problems in text analytics and object-oriented design. He received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry and has been working on problems in computing and chemistry at IBM and elsewhere in the industry for more than 20 years. He is a well-known writer, having published 15 books in computer science, is a columnist for JavaPro Magazine, and is currently the most widely translated author at IBM Research.

Akihiro Inokuchi IBM Research Division, Tokyo Research Laboratory, 1623-14, Shimotsuruma, Yamato, Kanagawa, Japan (inokuchi@jp.ibm.com). Dr. Inokuchi joined the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory in 2000 after receiving a master's degree in communication engineering from Osaka University. He received a Ph.D. degree in communication engineering from Osaka University in 2004. His current focus is on data mining, machine learning, text mining, chemo-informatics, bioinformatics, and their applications.

Bhavani Iyer IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, N.Y., 10532 (bsiyer@us.ibm.com). Ms. Iyer is a software engineer at the Watson Research Center. She received an M.B.A. degree in finance from the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines and an M.S. degree in computer science and information management from Pace University. Her most recent project involved the application of text analytics and unstructured information management systems to the life-science domain. Other interests include database management, distributed systems, data mining, and systems and application integration.

Yosi Mass IBM Research Division, Haifa Research Laboratory, University Campus, Haifa, Israel 31905 (yosimass@il.ibm.com). Mr. Mass received a B.Sc. degree in computer science from Bar Ilan University in Israel in 1980 and an M.Sc. degree from the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 1993. Mr. Mass has worked for IBM since 1996 at the Haifa Research lab as a researcher. Before joining IBM he worked in the Israeli high-tech industry for Orbotech and for Ubique. His research areas include virtual reality, visualization, security and trust, multi-user collaboration, XML, and information retrieval. In recent years, he has been working on an information retrieval engine for search in XML collections.

Hirofumi Matsuzawa IBM Research Division, Tokyo Research Laboratory, 1623-14, Shimotsuruma, Yamato, Kanagawa, Japan (matuzawa@jp.ibm.com). Mr. Matsuzawa joined the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory in 1993 after receiving a master's degree in software engineering from Waseda University. His experience includes 3D solid modeling, business intelligence, parallel OLAP, data mining, and text mining. His current focus is on data mining, text mining, and the application of grid architectures to life science.

L. Venkata Subramaniam IBM Research Division, India Research Lab., Block 1, IIT Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India 110017 (lvsubram@in.ibm.com). Dr. Subramaniam has been a research staff member at the IBM India Research lab since 1998. He received a B.E. degree in electronics and communications engineering from the University of Mysore in India, an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, and a Ph.D. degree in electronics from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, in 1991, 1993, and 1998, respectively. His current research interests include statistical natural language processing, text and data mining, and bioinformatics.