Tom Gruber

Who is Tom Gruber?

Tom Gruber is an innovator in technologies

that extend human intelligence. Building on early work in computer-mediated

learning and artificial intelligence, he focuses on creating environments

for collective intelligence.

He co-founded RealTravel,

which aspires to be the best place on the web to share knowledge

and experiences about travel.

RealTravel.com provides an

environment for a community of travel enthusiasts to create beautiful

travel journals of their adventures, share them with friends and

family, and find other like-minded travelers. People looking for

information about where to go, where to stay, or what to do in

their travels can learn from the authentic experiences of those

who have been there.

Previously he was co-founder and CTO of Intraspect

Software, which creates environments for professional people

working together on line. Intraspect applications help people

collaborate in large distributed communities, learn from each

other, and continuously contribute to a collective body of knowledge.

Intraspect is used by hundreds of corporate customers in Financial

Services, Marketing Services, Professional Services, High Technology,

and other globally distributed enterprises.

He is also a founder and Chief Scientist of Consider

Solutions, a

consultancy that helps Global 2000 companies to design and

implement coordinated systems of technology, processes, and human

organizations to maximize organizational effectiveness.

At Stanford University in the early

1990's, Gruber was a pioneer in the use of the Web for knowledge

sharing and collaboration. He established the DARPA

Knowledge Sharing Library, a web-based public exchange for ontologies,

software, and knowledge bases. Gruber also led the Stanford team

that invented and deployed the first Virtual

Document applications on the web that generate natural language

explanations in response to questions.

With colleagues at Stanford, Xerox PARC, and SRI, he designed

systems that provide shared virtual spaces for collaborative

work, agent-based collaborative engineering, and collaborative

learning. To support the collaborations of the WWW research community,

Gruber created HyperMail.

HyperMail turns ordinary electronic mail into a web-based organizational

memory. HyperMail was used as the archive and public forum for

some of the key discussions that

defined the emerging ideas of the early Web.

Tom is an advisor to interesting companies in financial services

(Wall Street), enterprise collaboration (SocialText, Consider),

social networking (LinkedIn),

semantic web (Radar

Networks),

Natural Language Search (Powerset),

mind mapping (Mindjet), life

story sharing (OurStory), social

compensation (OpenYear),

social entrepreneurship (ChangingThePresent.org),

and open content (the Internet

Archive).