Vice President for Research at Cycorp Inc
Austin, Texas Area
Vice President for Research at Cycorp Inc
Austin, Texas Area
Dr. Michael Witbrock received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and currently is Vice President for Research at Cycorp. Before becoming Vice President for Research, Dr. Witbrock was head of the Knowledge Formation and Dialogue department, with responsibility for all user-interaction systems at Cycorp. Previously he was Principal Scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge based approaches to understanding web user behavior, a research scientist at Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center, working on statistical text summarization, and a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon on the Informedia spoken and video document information retrieval project where he was also involved in the planning of the Experience on Demand Project. He also performed dissertation work in the area of speaker modeling. He is author of numerous publications in areas ranging across neural networks, parallel computer architecture, multimedia information retrieval, web browser design, genetic design, computational linguistics and speech recognition and of three US patents.
Research Management. Neural networks, parallel computer architecture, multimedia information retrieval, web browser design, genetic design, computational linguistics and speech recognition.
(Educational Institution; Research industry)
July 2009 — Present (5 months)
Acting as Technical Director for the EU FP7 LarKC project.
(Research industry)
April 2007 — Present (2 years 8 months)
Founder of Cycorp's European subsidiary, (CYCORP, RAZISKOVANJE IN EKSPERIMENTALNI RAZVOJ D.O.O.) Cycorp.eu, located in Slovenia, in 2005. Appointed CEO in 2007.
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)
May 2001 — Present (8 years 7 months)
As Vice President for Research, Dr Witbrock directly or indirectly supervises all research employees at Cycorp, and has overall responsibility for the company's commercial, governmental and internal research projects. He is also heavily involved in corporate planning and business development.
(Leisure, Travel & Tourism industry)
1994 — Present (15 years )
One of the first travel and tourism web sites on the Web, founded with other New Zealanders and Kiwiphiles to promote New Zealand, NZ.COM morphed into one of the major sites promoting tourism and travel to New Zealand.
(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; TRLY; Internet industry)
1999 — 2001 (2 years )
At Lycos, I worked on advanced product development, including on-line games, knowledge-based search improvements, and question answering. I was also responsible for the organisation of intellectual property (patent) capture, and for the technical review of several investment/acquisition possibilities. My work at Lycos resulted in one issued and three pending US patents.
(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; JSYSY; Computer Software industry)
1997 — 1999 (2 years )
At JustResearch I worked as a research scientist addressing problems related to document processing. A substantial amount of my work was on statistical document summarisation, resulting in two issued patents. Other areas of work included spoken document retrieval and computer vision. JustResearch was a wonderful place to work; I am very grateful to Justsystem, and particularly to the Ukigawas, for having made the opportunity available.
(Educational Institution; 201-500 employees; Higher Education industry)
1996 — 1997 (1 year )
Performed research on speech recognition, information retrieval and digital libraries in the Informedia research project.
Postdoc , Computer Science , 1995 — 1996
PhD , Computer Schence , 1986 — 1995
B.Sc. (Hons) , Psychology , 1980 — 1984
Major equivalents in Physiological Psychology and Computer Science