Kurt Bollacker is an American computer scientist with a research background in the areas of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

digital libraries A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital me ...

semantic network A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, ...

s, and electro-cardiographic modeling. He received a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in Computer Engineering from The

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

. Bollacker spent time as a biomedical research engineer at the

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

Medical Center where worked on electro-cardiography. He is co-creator of the

CiteSeer CiteSeerX (formerly called CiteSeer) is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science. CiteSeer's goal is to improve the dissemination and access of ac ...

research tool which was produced while he was a visiting researcher at the

NEC Research Institute NEC Corporation of America (NECAM) is the principal subsidiary of the multinational IT company NEC in the United States. NEC Corporation of America was formed on July 1, 2006, from the combined operations of NEC America, NEC Solutions (America) ...

. During his tenure as Technical Director of the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

, Bollacker lead the work to create The Wayback Machine. While Chief Scientist at

Metaweb Technologies Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a San Francisco, CA, San Francisco-based company that developed Freebase (database), Freebase, described as an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". The company was co-founded by Danny Hillis, Veda Hlub ...

he was key contributor to the development of

Freebase Freebase may refer to: *Free base or freebase, the pure basic form of an amine, as opposed to its salt form *Freebase (database), a former online database service *Freebase (mixtape), ''Freebase'' (mixtape), 2014 mixtape by 2 Chainz *An original ...

. After Metaweb, Bollacker worked at Applied Minds and as a consulting Data Scientist. Bollacker is a dedicated activist who is involved with multiple non-profit organizations. He serves on the Advisory Board of The

Common Crawl Common Crawl is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit 501(c) organization#501.28c.29.283.29, 501(c)(3) organization that web crawler, crawls the web and freely provides its archives and datasets to the public. Common Crawl's Web archiving, web arch ...

Foundation For several years he has pursued research on long term digital archiving as the Digital Research Director at the non-profit

Long Now Foundation The Long Now Foundation, established in 1996, is an American non-profit organization based in San Francisco that seeks to start and promote a long-term cultural institution. It aims to provide a counterpoint to what it views as today's "faster ...

References

External links

U.T. Austin student page for Kurt Bollacker

CiteSeer

Bollacker's article in American Scientist "Avoiding a Digital Dark Age"
American computer scientists Living people Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-compu-bio-stub