Dr David A. Evans is President, CEO and Chief Scientist of Clairvoyance Corporation, which he founded (as CLARITECH Corporation) in 1992. He also serves as the Chief Scientist and Director, Advanced Technology Innovation, for Justsystem Corporation of Japan.
David received his PhD degree in Computational Linguistics from Stanford University in 1982. He joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University in 1983, where he established the Computational Linguistics Program (in 1985) and the Laboratory for Computational Linguistics (in 1986), both of which he directed until 1996. As a Professor with appointments in the Department of Philosophy and in the School of Computer Science, he brought an interdisciplinary perspective to his work in natural-language processing (NLP) and information science. His development of the CLARIT system, beginning in 1988, realized a fusion of such ideas. The resulting CLARIT technology pioneered the use of language analysis to support such diverse functions as automatic text indexing, retrieval, filtering, categorization, summarization, extraction and information organization -- all within a single core process.
Today the CLARIT system is the core technology in Justsystem's ConceptBase, a suite of applications that together represent more than 40% of the market share of knowledge-management products in Japan. ConceptBase Search received the "Software Product of the Year" Award from the Japanese Government in 1998.
David has published three books and approximately one hundred refereed articles, in addition to more than one hundred other technical reports. He has been awarded, to date, 16 US patents on techniques and algorithms related to information processing, with an additional ten pending. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).
David regards his current work, focusing on Text Mining and Causal Modeling as the key functionality needed for automated Decision Support -- the ultimate challenge for information processing.