Raul Valdes-Perez, Chief Executive Officer

Raul has led Vivisimo since co-founding it in June, 2000. During his tenure, he has been recognized as a 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (North Central Region), top ten reader favorite for Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. magazine, twice a CEO of the year finalist by the Pittsburgh Technology Council, CEO Communicator of the Year by the Public Relations Society of America (Pittsburgh chapter), and an Outstanding Alumni Career Achievement by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before Vivisimo, Raul was on the Carnegie Mellon University computer science department faculty, where his research on new methods and applications of knowledge discovery led to publishing nearly 50 journal articles in natural, social and computer science. He was a principal investigator on six grants from the National Science Foundation, served on its advisory committee for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, and was an action editor of the journal Machine Learning. Raul received a Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 1991, where his adviser was Herbert A. Simon (Turing Award 1975 and Nobel Laureate 1978) and B.S. and M.S. degrees in information engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Jerome Pesenti, Chief Scientist

Jerome is chief scientist and co-founder of Vivisimo. In this role, Jerome acts as the visionary for the company driving development and delivery of Vivisimo's products. He also plays a crucial role in the company's overall strategic vision and growth. Before Vivisimo, Jerome was a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department, carrying out research on document clustering, data mining and artificial intelligence. Jerome is a frequent presenter at industry conferences including Microsoft's US Public CIO Summit, ICIC 2006 Conference, Life Sciences Conference and ASIDIC. He is an alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His academic degrees consist of a B.S. in philosophy from the Sorbonne, an M.S. in cognitive science from the University of Paris IV, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the University of Paris-Sud.

Christopher Palmer, Chief Technology Officer

Chris is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Vivisimo. Chris brings over 15 years of experience in research labs and academia to the company. In his role as CTO, Chris oversees the designing and building of its core enterprise search technology, which powers the search engines of worldwide organizations. Prior to Vivisimo, Chris was a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, working on database and data-mining problems. He has authored more than 20 papers in a variety of disciplines including text databases and information retrieval, distributed systems, relational databases, data mining, groupware and clustering. Chris received a M.Sc. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.Math degree from the University of Waterloo.

Dennis Brestensky, Vice President of Operations

Dennis has led operations for Vivisimo since mid-2001. He's a veteran entrepreneur who brings over 17 years of experience in developing early-stage businesses and leading operations, most recently as a VP for Stars and Stripes Omnimedia, a venture-backed start-up where his skills were invaluable to the early success and growth of the company. He served as the President of a technology and inventory control start-up that exceeded a million dollars in revenue the first year. He was the Regional Director for Karrington Health where he developed four new regions, led a team of 140 employees and held overall responsibility for a $25M P&L that helped position the company through IPO to acquisition. Dennis holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University with concentrations in entrepreneurship and finance.

Jeff Hornung, Vice President of Strategic Alliances

Jeff Hornung has over 25 years of experience in companies covering a broad range of hardware and software businesses. Most recently he was chief executive officer of Scentric, an Atlanta distributed data classification startup. Prior to Scentric, Jeff was vice-president and general manager at Network Appliance, guiding the virtualization and gateway business unit to $50M in revenue via partnerships with IBM, HP, and EMC. Before joining Network Appliance, he was vice-president of marketing and business development at Spinnaker Networks, helping guide the company to a $300M acquisition by Network Appliance. Jeff has also held a variety of leadership positions at Dell Computer, Network General and HP. Jeff has an MBA from Santa Clara University and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell.

Joe LeBas, Vice President of Sales

Joe LeBas brings to Vivisimo a proven record of generating customer demand and building market share across several industries and around the world. Joe most recently was managing director of North American sales at PolyServe, where he was instrumental in leading the infrastructure software company's growth in the U.S. commercial and federal government markets. Prior to PolyServe, Joe spent several years at PeopleSoft, Inc. where he helped pioneer the software leader's global accounts program. As director of global accounts, he led a worldwide team responsible for extending business relationships with a number of PeopleSoft's most visible international customers. Before joining PeopleSoft, Joe held the position of vice president of strategic accounts for Corporate Express, a $9B business-to-business services company. Earlier in his career, Joe held a variety of sales, key account and sales management positions with Revlon, Boston Scientific Corporation and AEI Music. He holds a B.S. in advertising from the University of Florida.

Rebecca Thompson, Vice President of Marketing

Rebecca has more than a dozen years of experience in high-technology marketing in both Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley. Formerly the vice president of marketing at FreeMarkets, she was responsible for managing and developing FreeMarkets' brand image and overseeing its global supply management solutions and all corporate marketing initiatives. Before FreeMarkets, Rebecca was director of corporate marketing for FORE Systems, where she led the corporate communications, advertising and market intelligence programs. She also worked as a manager of industry relations for Cisco Systems and as an industry analyst for Dataquest/Gartner Group, both in San Jose, CA. She has a B.A. in sociology from the University of North Dakota.