Dr James G. Shanahan

Bio

Jimi has spent the last 24 years developing and researching cutting-edge information management systems that harness machine learning, information retrieval, and linguistics. During the summer of 2007, he started a boutique consultancy (Church and Duncan Group Inc., in San Francisco) whose major goal is to help companies leverage their vast repositories of data using statistics, machine learning, optimization theory and data mining for big data applications (billions of examples) in areas such as web search, local and mobile search, and digital advertising and marketing. Church and Duncan Group’s clients include Adobe, AT&T Interactive, Akamai, Digg.com, eBay, SearchMe.com, Ancestry.com, MyOfferPal.com, and SkyGrid.com. In addition, Jimi has been affiliated with the University of California at Santa Cruz since 2009 where he teaches a sequence of courses on big data analytics, machine learning, and stochastic optimization (TIM 206, ISM 209, ISM 250 and ISM251). He advises several high-tech startups (e.g., Quixey.com, W3i, InferSystems) and is executive VP of science and technology at Irish Innovation Center (IIC). He has served as a fact and expert witness.

Prior to founding Church and Duncan Group Inc., Jimi was the founding Chief Scientist and executive team member at Turn Inc. (an online ad network that has recently morphed to a demand side platform). Prior to joining Turn, Jimi was Principal Research Scientist at Clairvoyance Corporation where he led the “Knowledge Discovery from Text” Group. In the late 1990s he was a Research Scientist at Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE) where he co-founded Document Souls, an anticipatory information system, where documents were given personalities of information services that foraged the web to stay informed and informative. In the early 90s, he worked on the AI Team within the Mitsubishi Group in Tokyo.

He has published six books, over 50 research publications, and 15 patents in the areas of machine learning and information processing. Jimi chaired CIKM 2008 (Napa Valley), co-chaired International Conference in Weblog and Social Media (ICWSM) 2011 in Barcelona, and was PC co-chair of ICWSM 2012 (Dublin). He co-chaired the ISSDM Workshop on Knowledge Management: Analytics and Big Data at UC Santa Cruz. He has organized several workshops in digital advertising as part of SIGIR, NIPS and SIGKDD. He is regularly invited to give talks at international conferences and universities around the world. Jimi received his Ph.D. in engineering mathematics from the University of Bristol, U. K. and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Limerick, Ireland. He is a Marie Curie fellow and member of IEEE and ACM. In 2011 he was selected as a member of the Silicon Valley 50 (Top 50 Irish Americans in Technology).