Frank Smadja,

As Executive Vice President of Engineering, Frank Smadja leads the IT and engineering operations of Toluna utilizing his expertise in users’ communities and innovative applications and services. He also brings with him the unique business perspective of having co-founded two successful startups: RawSugar, an early social bookmarking site, and ASAPNews, an internet news aggregator, which was acquired by Elron Software in 2003. Earlier experiences include a stint at Lehman Brothers as a senior software engineer developing information filtering solutions for news feeds and Bellcore as a research associate in computational linguistics. Frank is a prolific writer and researcher, having authored more than 20 research papers and articles. He has also been a co-author on multiple patents for web and text mining technologies. He holds an Engineering degree, majoring in math and physics, from Ecole Centrale de Paris, an MSc (DEA) in Computer Science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI), and a PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics from Columbia University.