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Management
Team
Technical Advisory Board
Investors
» Management
Chance Parker
Vice President & General Manager
Chance Parker heads the Web Intelligence Research Division at J.D. Power and Associates. He is responsible for leading the execution of social media research strategy across both new and existing business verticals.
Most recently, Chance was Executive Director, Digital Transformation where he was responsible for creating and executing the firm’s U.S. business strategy plan to transform client deliverables to a digital platform, which will provide greater client value, improve quality and speed to market. Previous to that, he led the relaunch and repositioning of the Vehicle Quality Survey platform for three of the company’s major syndicated automotive studies for which he was responsible.
Chance earlier was director of market research for Homestore.com, responsible for all primary market research and intelligence related to the 400,000 professional customers and approximately 5,000,000 consumers who visited the company’s network of Web sites each month.
Chance earned an M.B.A. degree at Pepperdine University and a bachelor’s degree from Southern Utah University with dual minors in marketing and economics.
Janet Eden-Harris
Vice President, Marketing
Janet Eden-Harris oversees Marketing strategy and execution at the Web Intelligence Division of J.D. Power and Associates. Janet joined Umbria, Inc. in
May 2006 from a leading, multinational information services
company, Information Resources, Inc. (IRI). As Executive Vice
President and Chief Marketing Officer at IRI, she was responsible
for global marketing operations, product management and strategy.
Previously, Janet spent the last decade directing marketing
initiatives at i2 Technologies, a leading provider of supply
chain management solutions for multiple industries including
CPG and Retail. Prior to i2, she was Chief Marketing Officer
for Aspect Development which was acquired by i2 to become
one of the largest mergers in software history. IRI Chairman,
Romesh Wadhwani, was founder and CEO of Aspect Development.
Prior to Aspect, Janet headed marketing for CADIS, a start-up
company, providing parts management solutions and early business
applications, which was acquired by Aspect Development. Before
CADIS, she was co-founder of Eden-Harris, Associates, a marketing
consulting agency, and held a variety of senior management
positions in the high tech and agency sector working for clients
such as Carte Blanche Credit Card, Barclays Bank, and PSA
Airlines.
Janet holds a B.A. degree in Journalism and Marketing
from the University of Oregon.
Howard Kaushansky
Founder
Howard Kaushansky is a serial entrepreneur and data mining
authority who brings 20 years of experience in starting and
operating emerging growth companies. Prior to founding Umbria,
Howard co-founded and served as CEO, secretary and vice president
of business development for Athene Software, which developed
enterprise predictive analytics software. Among other things,
his expertise was key in opening vital market segments for
Athene, including Internet and cable television;. Howard successfully
guided the sale of Athene to CSG Systems (NASDAQ: CSGS) in
2001.
From 1992 to 1997, Howard was VP of Strategic Planning, General
Counsel and Secretary of Coral Systems, Inc., which developed
fraud detection software for the telecommunications industry.
His work with Athene included establishing distribution channels
with industry-leading infrastructure providers, generating
70% of the company's revenues. Coral Systems was sold to Lightbridge
(NASDAQ: LTBG) in 1997.
Prior to joining Coral Systems, Howard was an attorney representing
numerous public and private companies. He holds several patents
and has spoken and written frequently in the areas of data
mining, customer relationship management, and predictive analytics.
Howard received his B.A. from the University of California,
Los Angeles and received his J.D. (Order of the Coif) from
the University of Southern California.
Andrew Evans
Senior Director, Business Development
Andrew Evans brings a broad range of industry experience from
venture-backed companies to Umbria. He has raised over $110
million in equity and debt from venture, strategic and corporate
investors for companies at various stages of development from
seed through private placement.
Andrew has over 10 years of experience in the high-tech sector,
growing companies and managing their finance, legal, human
resources and administration functions. Before joining Umbria,
he was the Chief Financial Officer at InPhase Technologies
and Zight Corporation. Prior to that, he managed international
investments for US West and spent eight years with KPMG in
both the London and Sydney offices.
Andrew received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Birmingham
University and is a Certified Public Accountant.
David B. Howlett
Senior Director, Client Insights
David Howlett brings over 20 years of market research and marketing expertise to Umbria. He comes to Umbria with substantial entrepreneurial success, having founded or been a part of building five startup companies to date.
Previously, Dave was Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at enterprise software company Athene Software. Prior, Dave was the Director of Marketing at Birch Telecom, where he guided the creation of the Birch Telecom brand, one of the strongest regional brands in telecommunications. He also served as Director of Product Management for Coral Systems, Inc. Dave served in a variety of market research, marketing, and product development roles at the Sprint Corporation which included overseeing a multi-million dollar market research budget for a $5 billion business unit of Sprint.
Dave received his M.B.A. from the Carroll Graduate School of Management at Boston College and his B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Kansas.
Richard Wolniewicz
Senior Director, Engineering
Richard Wolniewicz has 20 years experience in the machine learning, database, and numerical processing software industry, including 10 years of software development management experience. Prior to joining Umbria, Richard was the Senior Manager, Content Platform at Amazon.com, responsible for the delivery of content to Amazon’s discovery platform. His area of responsibility included statistical optimization of content to maximize the profitability of the website, ownership of the home, browse, and product pages, as well as large-scale web applications for content (HTML, rich media) management and delivery, the website’s business logic aggregation layer, and the browse hierarchy software.
Prior to Amazon, Richard worked with customer behavior predication software as VP Engineering at Athene Software, then VP Analytics at CSG Systems after CSG’s acquisition of Athene. Before Athene, Richard worked at a number of Colorado software companies including XVT Software, First Class Systems, HeurisTec Corporation, and Flatirons Computing, as well as working at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado.
Richard received his Ph.D. in Database Systems from the University of Colorado with a thesis in numerical and scientific database query processing. He also has a M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Engineering Physics, both from the University of Colorado.
Bill Tuohig
Senior Director, Product Development
Bill Tuohig brings over 15 years of experience in product management and marketing intelligence to Umbria .
Prior to joining Umbria , Bill was with Informative Inc., a technology and services company providing Voice-of-the Customer solutions for Fortune 100 and privately held global organizations. He led Informative's Solution Consulting Group, responsible for applying patented technologies and methodologies to engage consumers on key business issues such as new product development, marketing effectiveness, and brand perceptions. Bill also helped pioneer the identification of influential consumers and developed proprietary methodologies for leveraging them to support word of mouth marketing efforts. His clients included Bose, Intuit, Sprint, Mars, Masterfoods, Pfizer, Fannie Mae, and 1800Flowers.
Prior to Informative, Bill had seven years of Big-5 consulting experience at Deloitte Consulting and Coopers & Lybrand, and two years of e-Business strategy consulting experience at Sapient.
Bill received a B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania 's Wharton School of Business.
Nicolas Nicolov, Ph.D. – Chief Scientist
Dr. 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, Dr. 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. Nicolav 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.
» Technical Advisory Board
Daniel Jurafsky, Ph.D.
Dr. Jurafsky serves as an Associate Professor in the Department
of Linguistics at Stanford University. Dr. Jurafsky's research
focuses on statistical models of human and machine language
processing, with an emphasis on computational linguistics
and psycholinguistics, as well as automatic speech recognition.
Dr. Jurafsky received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University
of California, Berkeley, and has published extensively. Dr.
Jurafsky has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur
Fellowship in 2003.
James Martin, Ph.D.
Dr. Martin serves as Associate Professor at the Department
of Computer Science and the Institute for Cognitive Science,
University of Colorado. Dr. Martin's research focuses on computational
linguistics, information retrieval, and machine and cognitive
modeling. Dr. Martin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science
from University of California, Berkeley, and has published
extensively. He is the co-author, with Dr. Jurafsky, of Speech
and Language Processing, a preeminent work in the area of
Natural Language Processing.
Michael C. Mozer, Ph.D.
Dr. Mozer has served as a Professor and Associate Professor
at the Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive
Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, since 1992.
Prior to that, Dr. Mozer was an Assistant Professor at the
University of Colorado and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Departments
of Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
His research centers on computational analyses of the operation
of perceptual, cognitive, and control processes in the human
brain. He is also interested in neural network models for
temporal pattern processing, intelligent environments and
applications of machine learning with regard to practical
engineering problems. Dr. Mozer received his Ph.D. in Cognitive
Science from University of California, San Diego and has authored
over 80 publications concerning neural networks and machine
learning. He also serves on the governing boards of the Cognitive
Science Society and the Neural Information Processing Systems
(NIPS) Foundation.
Brad Perry, Ph.D.
Dr. Perry has over 17 years experience architecting and developing
solutions for Internet and Intranet information applications.
In addition to his activities with Umbria, Dr. Perry is the
Chief Scientist of Semantic Discovery, a textual and predictive
modeling company. Prior to his work with Semantic Discovery,
Dr. Perry was a Senior Research Scientist with WhizBang! Labs,
leading the definition and development of one of the company's
seminal product suites. Prior to WhizBang! Labs, Dr. Perry
was a Founder and the Vice President of Engineering for Easytrieve,
an Internet data harvesting company. Concurrently he was Adjunct
Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in
the Computer Science department. In addition, Dr. Perry has
developed Internet-based data collection and analysis applications
with MCC (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Consortium),
Hughes Research Laboratories and Bell Communications Research
(Bellcore). Dr. Perry received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees
in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles,
and his B.S. degree from University of California, Berkeley.
He has published extensively in the areas of Natural Language
Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Internet information.
» Investors
ArrowPath Venture Partners
With more than $325 million under management, ArrowPath is
a venture capital firm that helps entrepreneurs build companies
of enduring value while generating superior returns for investors.
The firm focuses on early and expansion stage companies with
highly differentiated enterprise and infrastructure technologies.
Through a proprietary network of relationships with Fortune
500 companies, ArrowPath identifies emerging technologies
and applications that deliver tangible ROI and meet end user's
needs. By maintaining focus on the end-user perspective, ArrowPath
helps portfolio companies hone their market focus, accelerate
time-to-market and provide a powerful competitive advantage.
 Sequel
Venture Partners
Sequel Venture Partners is a Colorado venture capital firm
specializing in early stage funding for technology businesses.
Sequel manages over $410 million in capital, and specializes
in healthcare, information technology and technical services,
primarily in the Rocky Mountain region.
 Vista
Ventures
Vista Ventures invests in high growth technology companies
throughout the greater Rocky Mountain region and in Boston
through its offices in Colorado and Massachusetts. The firm
focuses primarily on companies with the vision to provide
unique, "must have" products and services and
the desire to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
Vista also invests in enabling technologies that are revolutionizing
an array of traditional industries.
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