the Online Community
BOULDER, Colo., Sept. 6 -Umbria, Inc., a company that collects the unsolicited opinions and perceptions of the online community and turns them into actionable market intelligence, today announced it has added two renowned experts on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Nicolas Nicolov and Dott. Franco Salvetti, to its research division. They will serve as the company's chief scientist and principal research scientist respectively.
Dr. Nicolas Nicolov comes to Umbria from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, where he helped create a Natural Language Processing system for identifying time expressions that was recognized by the National Institute of Science and Technology. As Umbria's chief scientist, Nicolov is responsible for researching methodologies, developing solutions and coordinating the implementation of the scientific components of Umbria's text mining system.
Prior to IBM Research, Nicolov was a research fellow at the University of Sussex, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences and received his Ph.D in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Nicolov routinely publishes articles on different aspects of Natural Language Processing technology and most recently co-authored a chapter in the book entitled Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue.
Dott. Franco Salvetti, also an expert in Natural Language Processing, will work hand in hand with Nicolov as a principal research scientist for Umbria. Salvetti received his Laurea degree in Computer Science with specialization in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Milan. At Umbria, Salvetti is focused on developing techniques for crawling, text clustering, demographic segmentation, sentiment and social network analysis, all of which are used to provide Umbria's customers with a true assessment of the blogosphere's content.
In September 2005, Salvetti will have a chapter in the first published book on sentiment analysis, Computing Attitude and Affect in Text. Prior to working at Umbria, Salvetti held positions with both IBM Research and Google, Inc.
"At its core, Umbria is a technology company dedicated to driving advances in text mining and Natural Language Processing, so our customers can have an accurate assessment of consumer opinions expressed in the online community," said Howard Kaushansky, president and CEO of Umbria. "With the addition of these highly skilled scientists, Umbria is ensuring it will not only continue to enhance its Buzz Report product, but also advance the science of Natural Language Processing for the industry as a whole."
In addition to the credentials mentioned above, Nicolov and Salvetti were recently selected by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence to organize a symposium entitled, Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs. The symposium will be held at Stanford University in March 2006 and academics from more than 50 universities worldwide have already confirmed their participation. Representatives from entities doing some of the world's most innovative work in this area have recently joined Nicolov and Salvetti in the organization of the symposium, including Peter Pieroli, Xerox PARC and Peter Norvig, Google, Inc. To learn more about this event, please visit the symposium web site at http://www.umbrialistens.com/aaai2006_weblog_symposium/.
About Umbria
Umbria analyzes the opinions and perceptions of the online community-which is comprised of blogs, message boards, chat rooms, and other user forums-and turns such comments into actionable market insights for companies passionate about their brands and products.
Umbria amplifies the voice of the online community by using proprietary Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to dissect the who, what and why of online opinion-offering in-depth insights into the buzz about companies, brands, products, people, and topics of interest. Umbria provides services for some of the world's leading brands, including Electronic Arts, Sprint, and many others. For more information on Umbria, please visit http://www.umbrialistens.com .
Media Contact Information:
Regan Petersen
GroundFloor Media
303-332-3896
rpetersen@groundfloormedia.com
