Kurt Bollacker

Notable work and positions

Common Crawl Foundation - Advisor
Long Now Foundation - Digital Research Director
Internet Archive - Technical Director (led creation of the Wayback Machine)

Biography

Kurt Bollacker is an American computer scientist whose research spans machine learning, digital libraries, semantic networks and long-term digital archiving. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and worked earlier as a biomedical research engineer at the Duke University Medical Center, focusing on electrocardiographic modeling. As a visiting researcher at the NEC Research Institute, he co-created the CiteSeer research tool, an early academic search and citation-indexing system. As technical director of the Internet Archive, he led the creation of the Wayback Machine. He later served as chief scientist at Metaweb Technologies until 2009, where he was a key contributor to the development of the Freebase collaborative knowledge database, before working at Applied Minds and, from 2011, as a consulting data scientist at Infochimps. He has served as Digital Research Director at the Long Now Foundation, pursuing research on long-term digital archiving, and since 2012 has served on the Advisory Board of the Common Crawl Foundation, providing guidance on crawl technology, big data processing and open data collaborations.

Career highlights

• The Wayback Machine · Led its creation as technical director of the Internet Archive.
• CiteSeer · Co-created the early automated academic citation-indexing research tool.
• Freebase · Key contributor to the collaborative knowledge graph database as chief scientist of Metaweb Technologies.