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Professor Dr Jon Atle Gulla Head of department of Computer and Information Science, NTNU Co-leader of Web Intelligence and Semantics Laboratory
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Business |
Professor Gulla has been
actively involved in the commercialization of research from NTNU. LingIT was founded in 2001 and grew out of research in computational
linguistics at NTNU in Trondheim.
Among the early products were a spell-checker developed by professor Torbjørn Nordgård,
the Linguistic Department, and a question-answering system for Norwegian and
English developed by associate professor Tore Amble, the Department of
Computer and Information Science.
After Nordgård and Gulla
set up the company, LingIT has become a leading provider
of computational linguistics software in Scandinavia. From a rather modest start in 2001 LingIT has grown organically and had revenues of more
than 15 million NOK in 2009. Gulla is one of the co-founders of LingIT,
was sitting on LingIT’s board until 2003, and
is still one of the main shareholders of the company. Fast
Search & Transfer (now part of Yahoo!/Microsoft) Fast Search & Transfer was established in 1997
based on almost 20 years of research on search technologies at NTNU. Central in this process was Professor
Arne Halaas and his work on hardware-based search,
though it was their software-based Internet search engine, www.alltheweb.com, that
gradually attracted the most attention. When FAST acquired Elexir Sprachtechnologie in
Munich in 2000, Gulla was appointed Managing
Director of Elexir. His group was responsible for developing
linguistic software for FAST’s Internet search engine, which was one of
the world’s two largest Internet search engines at the time. This included components for language
identification, lemmatization, categorization, spam detection, phrasing and
anti-phrasing, and automata. The
Internet group of FAST was sold to Overture (later Yahoo!) for 70 million USD
in 2003. The remaining part of
FAST concentrated on the enterprise market and was eventually acquired by
Microsoft for 1.3 billion USD in 2008.
FAST’s technology is today used both in Yahoo!’s search
verticals and in Microsoft enterprise products like SharePoint. Businesscape was founded by Atle Onsmoen-Prange, Ole Andreas Hegle,
Jon Espen Ingvaldsen and
Jon Atle Gulla in
2004. The company develops
process mining tools for large enterprises and complex RFID flows. Combining
advanced data mining techniques and semantic technologies, the tools evaluate
business processes and uncover potential bottlenecks or structural
weaknesses. Even though the technology is still under development, the
company had revenues of about 3 million NOK in 2009. Professor Gulla
was the chairman of Businesscape from 2004 till
2011, and he is still sitting on Businesscape’s
board and is one of the four main shareholders. |
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