Speakers

Tsuyoshi Hamaya

Manager, Business Development Department, Search Division – NTT Resonant KK

After joining NTT in 1997, Mr. Hamaya participated in the operations of the portal site, goo at NTT-X from 2000. He was involved in various projects including the launch of image search service (in 2003) and the planning and development of NTT’s own image search engine (in 2005). In 2006, he was assigned to the planning and development of various projects including the launch of a search service for mobile phones. From the management of media services such as “environmental goo,” he has come to hold responsibility for the overall general planning and development of goo’s core business, its web search service.

Noriyoshi Ichinose

Group Manager, Portal Services Division – NEC BIGLOBE, Ltd

Mr. Ichinose joined NEC Corporation in 1986, and was involved in research of software development technology such as embedded technology, UNIX, and mobile service software. In 2008, he joined NEC Biglobe Ltd. where he is working on Biglobe’s search and mobile services.

Eric Gries

Lucid Imagination

Eric Gries joined Lucid Imagination as the President and CEO, after spending more than 20 years in executive leadership roles, where he built high-growth technology-based businesses. Prior to joining the company, Eric was an Executive-in-Residence at Granite Ventures. Eric has served as CEO, general manager and vice president for companies in application development, systems management, networking, financial services and hardware systems, in both the U.S. and Europe. Prior to joining Granite Ventures, Eric led XACCT, a pioneering network mediation market leader, as its president and CEO. XACCT was acquired by Amdocs in 2004, at which time Eric joined Amdocs’ executive team as Senior Vice President. Earlier in his career, Eric served as general manager of Compuware’s Network and Systems Management division, and held product management, marketing, sales and engineering positions at companies such as ACI, Cullinet Software and DEC.

Yonik Seeley

Creator of Solr and Co-Founder – Lucid Imagination

Yonik Seeley is the creator of Solr. He is an expert in distributed search systems architecture and performance. Yonik has been a prolific Lucene/Solr committer, a member of the Lucene PMC, and a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Yonik’s work experience includes CNET Networks, BEA and Telcordia. He earned his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Joe McCunney

Senior Support Engineer, Customer Solutions – Endeca

Joe heads the APAC Product Support team, responsible for all Endeca product-related issues and escalations generated out of the APAC region. Prior to Endeca, Joe held positions at Oracle and PeopleSoft in Japan and Australia.

Jason Purcell

Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management – Endeca

Jason spearheads Endeca’s global marketing and product management organizations, responsible for core product marketing, strategy, and messaging. Jason’s earlier roles at Endeca included leading the technical sales organization and establishing new product initiatives. Prior to Endeca, Jason held positions at Parametric Technologies in the US and Japan.

Jason holds a B.Sc. in Biological and Engineering Sciences from Washington University.

Koji Sekiguchi

President – RONDHUIT Co., Ltd.

Koji began his engineering career with positions at IT vendors like DEC Japan (now Hewlett-Packard Japan) and BEA Systems Japan (now Oracle Corporation Japan). In 2006, he founded Rondhuit Co., Ltd., which specializes in Apache Lucene/Solr technology. He is active in the Apache Lucene/Solr community as an Apache Solr committer (i.e., a person who reviews the code of contributor for committing to the Apache Solr source code base) and a contributor to Apache Lucene.

Christian Moen

Founder & CEO – Atilika Inc.

Christian founded Atilika Inc. in October, 2009 to help Japanese companies apply search and related technologies to improve or transform their businesses. Atilika is proficient in the fields of search and recommendation engines, computational linguistics, data mining, and applying these technologies to business problems in news media, publishing, advertisement and e-commerce.

Prior to starting Atilika, Christian spent 10 years at FAST (now Microsoft) working at their R&D headquarters, in Oslo, and their Tokyo branch office. In FAST R&D, Christian led product development teams responsible for developing the FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) product infrastructure. In 2005, he relocated to Tokyo and served in management and architecture roles, helping to establish FAST’s solid position in the Japanese search market. In Japan, he has worked with leading telecommunication companies, news media publishers, advertisement companies and Internet service providers both at the engineering and executive level.

Christian holds a Master of Science degree in computer science from the University of Oslo, Norway.

Carl W. Hoffman

CEO and Chairman – Basis Technology Corp.

Carl founded Basis Technology in 1995 to provide rapid software internationalization services to American companies entering Asian markets. Since then, the company has grown to become the leading provider of technology for software globalization and multilingual information retrieval. During 2000, Carl concurrently held the position of VP Asia for Amazon.com, and in 2001 was honored by the Massachusetts eCommerce industry association for his leadership in launching Amazon.com Japan. Prior to starting Basis Technology, Carl worked as an independent consultant in Boston, New York and Tokyo to international clients including Baring Securities, Carnegie Group, Intellicorp, Nichimen Corporation, Nikko Securities, Nippon Steel, NTT, and Toshiba Corporation. Carl was educated at MIT where he also spent eight years on the research staff at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. He is an active contributor to several non-profit organizations, including the Unicode Consortium, the Free Software Foundation and the MIT Alumni Fund.

Steve Cohen

Executive Vice President and COO – Basis Technology Corp.

Steve co-founded Basis Technology with Carl Hoffman in 1995. He is responsible for the worldwide sales and the planning and operations of Basis Technology’s linguistic product research and development. Prior to starting Basis Technology, Steve was engineering manager for Cognex Corporation’s Tokyo office and development manager for SMT device inspection. He has also consulted on software internationalization engineering. Steve earned a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and studied at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Steve Kearns

Rosette Product Manager – Basis Technology Corp.

Steve Kearns was brought on board Basis Technology in August 2008 to be the product manager of the Rosette Name Translator and the Rosette Name Indexer and is now the product manager for the entire Rosette platform. Steve is also the subject matter expert for the international compliance market within Basis. Prior to Basis, Steve worked at BBN Technologies where he was a project and team lead for the Broadcast and Web Monitoring Systems, which capture and extract Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) from live television and Internet news websites. He has experience in information visualization, distributed systems architecture and received his MS in information technology and BS in computer information systems from Bentley College.

Kazuaki Hiraga

Senior Software Engineer – Basis Technology Corp.

Kazuaki develops technology for products aimed at the Japanese market. He joined Basis Technology in 2008, bringing 8 years of experience in the search engine industry. He started his career at NTT DoCoMo systems and then moved on to Infoseek Japan where he first became acquainted with Basis Technology’s Rosette linguistics platform in integrating it with Ultraseek’s Japanese search engine, which was acquired by Rakuten. Immediately prior to Basis Technology, Kazuaki was a Senior Software Engineer at FAST working with its Enterprise Search Platform.

Kazu graduated from Tokai University in Japan with an engineering degree in information and telecommunication. He is also an active member of Gengo Shori Gakkai, a text processing study group.

Benjamin Douglas

Principal Engineer – Basis Technology Corp.

At Basis Technology, Ben applies his 10 years of experience with linguistic software in his work on the Rosette Name Indexer and other linguistic-oriented projects. Previously, he worked at software companies in the U.S., Japan and Germany. In addition to purely linguistic projects, he has worked on embedded software with Access Co., Ltd. of Japan and enterprise search with FAST Search and Transfer in Germany. Ben has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Davis, and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

T. “Kuro” Kurosaka

Senior Software Engineer – Basis Technology Corp.

As a Senior Software Engineer with Basis Technology since 2001, Kuro has been involved in the design and development of various components of the flagship Rosette linguistics platform product, and is the lead engineer for Rosette’s Apache Lucene/Solr integration components. Kuro has also provide consulting services to Basis Technology customers in various internationalization and custom development projects. He has a master’s degree in computer science from Kyushu University in Japan, and is a native speaker of Japanese.