IAPR Sponsored Keynote Speakers

Jim Fruchterman

Benetech President, CEO, Founder

A technology entrepreneur, Jim Fruchterman has been a rocket scientist, founded two of the foremost optical character recognition companies, and developed successful social enterprises. Fruchterman co-founded Calera Recognition Systems in 1982. Calera developed character recognition that would allow computers to read virtually all printed text. In 1989, Fruchterman founded Arkenstone to produce reading machines for the disabled community based on the Calera technology. Following the sale of the Arkenstone product line in 2000, Fruchterman used all of the resulting capital to fund Benetech, with an explicit goal to use power of technology to serve humanity. Benetech is a global leader in socially motivated applications of technology, active in literacy, accessibility, human rights, humanitarian demining and the environment. Fruchterman has also been active in public service, with two stints on U.S. federal advisory committees. He is a founding director of the Social Enterprise Alliance, the international association for entrepreneurs running businesses in the nonprofit sector. Fruchterman was named as an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur 2003 by the Schwab Foundation and participated in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2003, 2004 and 2005. In 2003, he also received the American Library Association Francis Joseph Campbell award, presented to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of library service for the blind and physically handicapped and the Robert F. Bray Award from the American Council of the Blind in recognition of his outstanding efforts to make literary works accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired. In addition, Fruchterman is a co-founder and director of RAF Technology, Inc., America's leading high-end OCR technology company, used by the United States Postal Service to route the mail. Fruchterman believes that technology is the ultimate leveler, allowing disadvantaged people achieve more equality in society.

Ian Witten

Professor of Computer Science, University of Waikato, New Zealand

Ian H. Witten is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand where he directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He has published widely in these areas, including six books, the most recent being Managing Gigabytes (1999), How to build a digital library (2003) and Data Mining (2005), all from Morgan Kaufmann. He received an MA in mathematics from Cambridge Unversity, England; an MSc in computer science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in electrical engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He received the 2004 IFIP Namur Award, a biennial honour accorded for ?outstanding contribution with international impact to the awareness of social implications of information and communication technology, and the 2005 SIGKDD Service Award, given for an outstanding contribution to the data mining field.