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Scientists’ Expertise Help Umbria Deliver Comprehensive and Timely Analysis
of the Online Community
Boulder, Col. – (Sept. 6, 2005) – 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 Machine Learning, 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, 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. Nicolov routinely publishes articles on
different aspects of Natural Language Processing technology and most recently coauthored
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.
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.
“Umbria is dedicated to driving advances in text mining, Natural Language Processing
and Machine Learning,” said Howard Kaushansky, president and CEO of Umbria. “With
the addition of these highly accomplished scientists, Umbria is ensuring it will continue to
enhance its Buzz Report, and also advance the science of Natural Language
Processing.”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 oganization 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 is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes the unaided opinions, perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the online world (comprised of blogs, message boards, Usenet, product review sites, etc.) and distills it into actionable insights about companies, brands, products, people and issues.
Umbria analyzes voices 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 for some of the world's leading brands, including Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, Wild Oats and many others. For more information on Umbria, please visit www.umbrialistens.com.
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