I am extremely happy to announce that Professor Jim Hendler has joined the Common Crawl Advisory Board.  Professor Hendler is the Head of the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and also serves as the Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at RPI’s Tetherless World Constellation.

 Jim Hendler is a highly respected leader and an early innovator of the Semantic Web. In fact, he has been writing about it for over a decade – since before most of us had even heard the term. The 2001 article in Scientific American that he coauthored with Tim Berners Lee and Ora Lassila has been cited over 15,000 times and to this day is one of the very best explanations of the potential of the Semantic Web.  He is one of the editors of Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web where he recently published Aaron Swartz’s A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work. Aaron Swartz’s book is available as a free download. I strongly encourage everyone to read it and to spread the word about it so it reaches as many people as possible.

 Professor Hendler is also a strong advocate for open government data and has pushed that movement forward through his work with the data.gov project and his Linking Open Government Data project.  His Twitter feed is an excellent source of information  about open government data and about all of the important and exciting work he does.

Having Professor Hendler’s insight and guidance will be a tremendous benefit to Common Crawl and everyone on the team is very excited that he has joined us!

As part of our ongoing effort to grow Common Crawl into a truly useful and innovative tool, we recently formed an Advisory Board to guide us in our efforts. We have a stellar line-up of advisory board members who will lend their passion and expertise in numerous fields as we grow our vision. Together with our dedicated Board of Directors, we feel the organization is more prepared than ever to usher in an exciting new phase for Common Crawl and a new wave of innovation in education, business, and research.

Here is a brief introduction to the men and women who have generously agreed to donate their time and brainpower to Common Crawl. Full bios are available on our Advisory Board page.

Our legal counsel, Kevin DeBré, is a well respected Intellectual Property (IP) attorney who has continually worked at the forefront of the evolving IP landscape. Glenn Otis Brown brings additional legal expertise as well as a long history of working at the forefront of tech and the open web, including currently serving as Director of Business Development for Twitter and on the board of Creative Commons. Another strong advocate for openness, Joi Ito, is Director of the MIT Media Lab and Creative Commons Board Chair, who brings with him years of innovative work as a thought-leader in the field.

We look forward to the advice of Jen Pahlka, founder and Executive Director at Code for America. Jen has led Code for America through a remarkable two years of growth to become a high-impact success, and we are delighted to have her insight on growing a non-profit as well as her experience working with government. Eva Ho, VP of Marketing & Operations at Factual who has also served on the boards of several nonprofits, brings additional insight into nonprofit management, as well as valuable experience around big data.

Big data is critical to our work of maintaining an open crawl of the web, and we are fortunate to have numerous experts who can advise on this critical area. Kurt Bollacker is the Digital Research Director of the Long Now Foundation and he formerly served as Technical Director at Internet Archive and Chief Scientist at Metaweb. Pete Skomoroch is a highly respected data scientist, currently employed by LinkedIn, who brings with him substantial knowledge about machine learning and search. Boris Shimanovsky is a prolific, lifelong programmer and Director of Engineering at Factual. Pete Warden, also a programmer, is the current CTO of Jetpac and a highly respected expert in large-scale data processing and visualization.

Danny Sullivan, widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” will bring valuable guidance and insight as Common Crawl grows and develops. Bill Michels is another member of our team with extensive experience in search from his years at Yahoo! which include working as Director of Yahoo! BOSS. We are very lucky to have Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.

We are delighted that such an array of talented people see the importance in the work we do, and are honored to have their guidance as we look forward to a year of growth and milestones for Common Crawl.