Seminar Announcement
Title: The University of the Future: Taking Knowledge Out of Campus, A Personal Tale
Nivio Ziviani, Department of Computer Science, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Time: Friday, March 27th, 11:30
Place: Room QA 1.1 (South Tower)
Abstract:
An important way of wealth generation is the creation of knowledge intensive startups from research results. The objective of this talk is to present the experience of startup creation in the Department of Computer Science of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. We will discuss three examples: (i) Miner Technology Group, sold to the group Folha de São Paulo/UOL in June 1999, which is one of the first experiences in spinning off a Web startup company from research conducted at a Brazilian university; (ii) Akwan Information Technologies, which became a successful startup and a reference for web search in Brazil and was acquired by Google Inc. in July 2005—an acquisition from which Google bootstrapped its R&D Center for Latin America, located in Belo Horizonte; and (iii) Zunnit Technologies — a new startup company focused on the convergence of Deep Learning and Big Data aiming to improve knowledge of user behavior, management of multimedia assets, sales leads, or recommendation of items of interest for web users.
Biography:
Nivio Ziviani has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, 1982. He is a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Computer Science of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and CEO of Zunnit Technologies. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and of the National Order of the Scientific Merit in the class Comendador. He received the Prize of Scientific Merit of the Brazilian Computer Science Society in 2011. He is a co-founder of Miner Technology Group, Akwan Information Technologies and Zunnit Technologies. He is author of two books in the area of algorithm design and has co-authored over 120 refereed papers in the areas of algorithm design and information retrieval, the latter his primary area of research. He was General Co-Chair of the 28th ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval and co-founder of the International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE).
