Michael Witbrock has a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, he does Reasoning & ML research at IBM and was Founder/CEO at Curious Cat Company, building assistants that actually understand you and what you do, Vice President for Research at Cycorp, and CEO at Cycorp Europe, where he lead research in automated knowledge acquisition from text and dialogue, automated reasoning, and intelligent human-computer interaction. He was also 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