Who is Gary Flake? OV / AV / FAST Chief Science Officer

[heini]

As of August 1, 2002, Gary Flake quit at NECI and became Chief Science Officer of Overture. He was appointed for the same position after the merger with Altavista and Fast websearch. Which means something, given all the talent both companies have brought aboard.

So who is Gary Flake?
It appears he was part of the crew around Steve Lawrence et al. Best known to the public are probably his works on The Computational Beauty of Nature
Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation [mitpress.mit.edu], and
Gary Flake, Steve Lawrence, C. Lee Giles, Frans Coetzee: Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities [webselforganization.com]

The interesting thing is Gary Flake obviously is an expert on algorythmic search, specifically link analysis.
Which makes me wonder why OV hired this man back in summer last year.

From webselforganization:

NEC's new method operates independent of text content and can identify previously unknown communities.
NEC has developed a new method to enable the identification of communities across the entire web (over 4 billion pages).

Also an interesting read is
Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web [modelingtheweb.com]

[IanTurner]

Hmm wonder if that link analysis was affected by spammers link farming with auto generation programs.

[heini]

>affected
Like all research this is labs conditions. Same as what got Google started, and Fast.
What I just find interesting is that OV would appoint a link analysis specialist as CSO, while all they were doing at that time was totally unrelated.

[edited by: heini at 10:05 pm (utc) on Feb. 25, 2003]

[IanTurner]

Given recent acquisitions I would have thought that was fairly obvious. He was probably doing technical due diligence before the acquisitions and probably has a good overview of what both Alta and FAST are doing.

[rubble88]

For those who are interested in this sort of thing, Gary Flake was named to bring the various technologies together.

Flake previously worked at NEC Research. Some of the most useful web specialized search tools including Research Index [researchindex.com] and a metasearch tools Inquirus and Inquiris2 were developed there.

Btw, all of these tools are online for demo.

Some of Gary Flake's writing:

"Using Web Structure for Classifying and Describing Web Pages", 2002 [neci.nec.com]

"Improving Category Specific Web Search by Learning Query Modifications", 2001 [neci.nec.com]

"Efficient Identification of Web Communities", 2000 [citeseer.nj.nec.com]

DEADLINER: Building a New Niche Search Engine" [citeseer.nj.nec.com]

Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities [webselforganization.com]

Finally, it's also important to mention that AltaVista has another highly respected web search/info retrieval researcher/scientist/developer on its team, Jan Pedersen.

[edited by: msgraph at 1:28 pm (utc) on Feb. 26, 2003]
[edit reason] small link edit [/edit]

[GoogleGuy]

I think he came to Google and gave a talk about identifying web communities when he was still at NEC. Nice guy.

[rubble88]

Gary Flake's former colleague, frequent writing partner, etc. Steve Lawrence, is now a researcher at Google.