Research Team
Pingar is committed to ongoing research and developing innovative technologies. Our research team consists of in-house researchers as well as several world-renowned collaborators. Our background and research areas cover a wide range of expertise necessary for the intelligent handling of unstructured text data. We have ongoing projects in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, and User Interfaces across a number of languages and verticals.
Current Researchers
Alyona Medelyan
Alyona’s PhD in Natural Language Processing was completed at the University of Waikato and funded by Google.
She joined Pingar in 2009 and is now the company’s Chief Research Officer. Her expertise areas are Keywords and Entity Extraction, as well as Wikipedia Mining.
Alyona’s website | Twitter: @zelandiya
Anna Divoli
Anna holds a PhD in Biomedical Text Mining from the University of Manchester. She held two PostDocs positions at UCBerkeley and the University of Chicago, before joining Pingar in 2011. Anna’s key areas of expertise are Text Mining, User Interfaces and Information Retrieval.
Anna’s website | Twitter: @annadivoli
Jeen Broekstra
Jeen holds a PhD in Semantic Web Technologies and is an expert in Ontologies, Linked Data, Sesame and Sparql. Jeen collaborates with Pingar’s researchers on specific projects via his Wellington consultancy Rivuli Development.
Jeen’s Blog |Twitter: @jeenbroekstra
Matthew Pike
Matthew holds an MEng in Computer Science from Swansea University. He is currently a research intern at Pingar working on a User Interface for viewing and editing taxonomies. Matthew plans to start his PhD at Nottingham University with Dr. Max L. Wilson in 2013.
Academic Collaborators
Ian Witten
Ian is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato, NZ. He is the author of several books on Machine Learning, Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries. Ian’s awards winning research labs have produced software like Greenstone and Weka used by thousands of organizations around the world. A joint project by Ian Witten’s PostDocs and Pingar’s research team is currently funded by NZ’s Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Max L. Wilson
Max is Assistant Professor at the Mixed Reality Lab in the University of Nottingham, UK and focuses on Human-Computer Interaction, Information Science and Search User Interfaces. Max runs the yearly workshop euroHCIR on Search User Interfaces, which brings industry and academia together. Several students supervised by Max are undertaking research in conjunction with Pingar: Jon Hurlock, Matt Pike and Anthony Lawrence.
Alumni
Dave Milne
Dave’s University of Waikato PhD focus was on Information Retrieval aided by Wikipedia which resulted in a popular open-source toolkit Wikipedia Miner. Dave has been working on the entity recognition algorithms and the taxonomy extraction projects at Pingar.
Anna Huang
Anna has completed a PhD in Document Clustering at the University of Waikato. Anna has been collaborating with Pingar on the automated taxonomy extraction project.
Jose Chen
Jose joined Pingar after completing his PhD in Text Categorization and for a year was working on Chinese text analysis tools, including Text Segmentation and Names Extraction. Jose is currently a PostDoc at the US National Institute of Health.
Steve Manion
Steve is in the middle of his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Canterbury. He joined Pingar for a 6-months internship to work on automated taxonomy extraction and Japanese text analysis.