Scientists' Expertise Help Umbria Deliver Comprehensive and Timely Analysis of

the Online Community

    BOULDER, Colo., Sept. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Umbria, Inc., a company that
 collects the unsolicited opinions and perceptions of the online community and
 turns them into actionable market intelligence, today announced it has added
 two renowned experts on Natural Language Processing and Artificial
 Intelligence, Dr. Nicolas Nicolov and Dott. Franco Salvetti, to its research
 division. They will serve as the company's chief scientist and principal
 research scientist respectively.
     Dr. Nicolas Nicolov comes to Umbria from IBM's T.J. Watson Research
 Center, where he helped create a Natural Language Processing system for
 identifying time expressions that was recognized by the National Institute of
 Science and Technology. As Umbria's chief scientist, Nicolov is responsible
 for researching methodologies, developing solutions and coordinating the
 implementation of the scientific components of Umbria's text mining system.
     Prior to IBM Research, Nicolov was a research fellow at the University of
 Sussex, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences and received his Ph.D in
 Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Nicolov routinely
 publishes articles on different aspects of Natural Language Processing
 technology and most recently co-authored a chapter in the book entitled
 Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue.
     Dott. Franco Salvetti, also an expert in Natural Language Processing, will
 work hand in hand with Nicolov as a principal research scientist for Umbria.
 Salvetti received his Laurea degree in Computer Science with specialization in
 Artificial Intelligence from the University of Milan. At Umbria, Salvetti is
 focused on developing techniques for crawling, text clustering, demographic
 segmentation, sentiment and social network analysis, all of which are used to
 provide Umbria's customers with a true assessment of the blogosphere's
 content.
     In September 2005, Salvetti will have a chapter in the first published
 book on sentiment analysis, Computing Attitude and Affect in Text. Prior to
 working at Umbria, Salvetti held positions with both IBM Research and Google,
 Inc.
     "At its core, Umbria is a technology company dedicated to driving advances
 in text mining and Natural Language Processing, so our customers can have an
 accurate assessment of consumer opinions expressed in the online community,"
 said Howard Kaushansky, president and CEO of Umbria. "With the addition of
 these highly skilled scientists, Umbria is ensuring it will not only continue
 to enhance its Buzz Report product, but also advance the science of Natural
 Language Processing for the industry as a whole."
     In addition to the credentials mentioned above, Nicolov and Salvetti were
 recently selected by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence to
 organize a symposium entitled, Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs.
 The symposium will be held at Stanford University in March 2006 and academics
 from more than 50 universities worldwide have already confirmed their
 participation. Representatives from entities doing some of the world's most
 innovative work in this area have recently joined Nicolov and Salvetti in the
 organization of the symposium, including Peter Pieroli, Xerox PARC and Peter
 Norvig, Google, Inc.  To learn more about this event, please visit the
 symposium web site at http://www.umbrialistens.com/aaai2006_weblog_symposium/.
 
     About Umbria
     Umbria analyzes the opinions and perceptions of the online community-which
 is comprised of blogs, message boards, chat rooms, and other user forums-and
 turns such comments into actionable market insights for companies passionate
 about their brands and products.
     Umbria amplifies the voice of the online community by using proprietary
 Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to dissect the
 who, what and why of online opinion-offering in-depth insights into the buzz
 about companies, brands, products, people, and topics of interest. Umbria
 provides services for some of the world's leading brands, including Electronic
 Arts, Sprint, and many others. For more information on Umbria, please visit
 http://www.umbrialistens.com .
 
     Media Contact Information:
      Regan Petersen
      GroundFloor Media
      303-332-3896
      rpetersen@groundfloormedia.com
 
 

SOURCE  Umbria, Inc.