Exalead Names Dr. Gregory Grefenstette as Chief Science Officer

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(MARKET WIRE)--Jan 7, 2009 -- Exalead, a global leader of information access software for business and the web, today announced the appointment of Gregory Grefenstette as chief science officer.

Grefenstette, who will be based in Exalead's Paris headquarters, will use his 25 years of academic and commercial research in language and semantic processing to enhance Exalead's language processing technologies, to facilitate other product design developments, to strengthen intellectual property, and to promote and share Exalead's innovations within the scientific community.

As information access platforms are required to search across a wider range of structured and unstructured data, Grefenstette's research and experiences will be crucial to helping Exalead's semantic team improve their platform to better extract, normalize and tabulate search results, with the goal of making all data accessible and actionable for the business user.

"Enterprise search today parallels early model washing machines from the 1920s. Those machines did some of the work but still required a significant amount of manual labor, just as search does today," said Grefenstette. "Today's enterprise solutions only address a small part of the search puzzle. Exalead has built an information access platform that preprocesses search results to automatically help people find data faster and that displays results in more useful contexts, allowing people to get their jobs done rather than wasting time in search."

In addition to product development, Grefenstette will be responsible for accelerating the growth of Exalead's partner ecosystems within the academic and industrial community. Exalead's open platform allows for quick adoption of leading innovations from academia and commercial researchers to enrich data including video and speech to text.

"We are thrilled someone of Dr. Grefenstette's stature is joining Exalead at such an exciting time," said François Bourdoncle, Exalead Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. "In 2008, we have seen record sales growth worldwide and have received a number of industry accolades. We look forward to leveraging the expertise of Dr. Grefenstette and the rest of our team to continue innovating and forge ahead into 2009."

Grefenstette, who received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, has been a fixture of the information retrieval and natural language processing fields since 1988. A highly cited author and frequent member of international conference committees, he possesses 15 patents in the U.S. including the design of a photocopier for cross language information retrieval (US 6,396,951), for finding experts in a company by mining Web usage (US 6,446,035) and for creating documents that enrich themselves (US 6,732,090).

Most recently, Grefenstette worked as a senior expert at CEA (the Atomic Energy Commission -- an applied research center in France). Before that, he worked as an engineer at Honeywell Bull, taught at the University of Tours and worked as a principal scientist at Xerox Research and Clairvoyance Corporation.

"Exalead's innovative technology is already easing the information access burden of a wide variety of enterprises around the globe," said Grefenstette. "My goal is to use my experience in information retrieval and with natural language processing as a guide to help Exalead continue to provide our customers the most complete and robust information access solutions possible."

A video of Gregory discussing his background and why he joined Exalead can be found at http://tinyurl.com/6bh4ts.

About Exalead

Founded in 2000 by search engine pioneers, Exalead® is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as Price Waterhouse Cooper, Michelin, and American Greetings, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with a platform, Exalead CloudView(TM) that uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data in the disparate, heterogeneous enterprise information cloud. The system collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.

Exalead is an operating unit of Qualis, an international holding company, with offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan and Darmstadt. Readers who wish to gain more information about Exalead can visit www.Exalead.com or contact (415) 230 3800.

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