Raul Valdes-Perez is an entrepreneur and com- natural, social, and computer science, such as in puter scientist. Currently he is owner of Advice Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Brain is for Winners, LLC which he organized to pub- and Language, Journal of Theoretical Biology, lish a forthcoming book Advice is for Winners: Organometallics, Physical Review E, Anthropo- How to Seek, Get, and Use Advice. Raul co- logical Linguistics, and Communications of the founded Vivisimo Inc. in June 2000 and served ACM. He saw Vivisimo as a continuation of his as its CEO and Chairman for nine years until work on making knowledge workers - whether recruiting a new leadership team in June 2009. scientists or not - more productive at finding He then served as Executive Chairman until patterns and new knowledge from data and text. Vivisimo’s acquisition by IBM in May 2012. In the company’s early days, he raised National Raul has been a Principal Investigator on seven Science Foundation grants totaling grants from the National Science nearly $1M and $500,000 from Inno- Foundation, served on its advisory vation Works (a state committee for Social, Behavioral, investment agency), launched and Economic Sciences, and was Vivisimo to consistent double-digit an action editor of the journal Ma- revenue growth, profitable quarters, chine Learning. Representing and prominence as an enterprise Vivísimo, he has spoken at the search company (Leader on the Gart- Wharton Technology Conference, ner Magic Quadrant) without ever Strategies, KM raising equity investment up through World & Intranets, FOSE, Busi- the acquisition. ness4Site, and many others dis- cussing search technology and its Raul’s entrepreneurial contributions future, and he represented have been acknowledged with these Vivisimo at the White House’s awards: Jobs summit in Dec 2009, hosted by President Obama. He is on the Board of Di- Top Ten Reader Favorite for Entrepreneur rectors of the Technology Council and of the Year by Inc. magazine the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council, and the CEO of the year finalist (twice: ‘06 & ‘07) Advisory Board of Safaba Translation Solutions. by the Pittsburgh Technology Council 100 Most Important Hispanics in Business Raul received a computer science Ph.D. at Car- and Technology by Hispanic Engineer mag- negie Mellon in 1991 with a thesis on “Machine azine (3 consecutive years) Discovery of Chemical Reaction Pathways” ad- CEO Communicator of the Year (for-profit) vised by Herbert A. Simon (Nobel Laureate in by the Public Relations Society of America Economics, 1978). He spent 1984-86 as a Re- (Pittsburgh Chapter) search Scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Alumni Career Achievement, Lab in Randy Davis's expert-systems group, and UIC College of Engineering, 2006 1983-84 as a software engineer at Itau Carnegie Science Center Information Tech- Tecnologia in Sao Paulo, Brazil, designing and nology Award for Excellence, 2006 implementing a Logo interpreter in Z80 assem- bly language for a 64kB RAM machine. He Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year E- graduated with a B.S. (1980) and M.S. (1982) in commerce, North Central Area, 2007 information engineering from the University of Citizen of the Year, 2007, Squirrel Hill Ur- Illinois at Chicago. He holds one patent in search ban Coalition technology.

Before starting Vivisimo, Raul was a faculty Raul was born in Havana, Cuba and attended member (research) from 1991 through 2000 at school in Chicago and its suburbs. He has stud- Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, ied or worked in Spain, Brazil, and China and is where he remains an Adjunct Associate Profes- fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. He lives with sor. His research on new methods and applica- his family in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighbor- tions of knowledge discovery led to publishing hood. 50 scholarly journal articles and book chapters in