Anand Rajaraman is CEO of Kosmix Inc., a website which organizes the Internet by topic. He is also a consulting assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. In 1996, together with four other engineers, Rajaraman founded Junglee Corp., which pioneered Internet comparison shopping. It was acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in August 1998 for 1.6 million shares of stock valued at $250 million. Rajaraman went on to become Director of Technology at Amazon.com, where he was responsible for technology strategy. He helped launch the transformation of Amazon.com from a retailer into a retail platform, enabling third-party retailers to sell on Amazon.com's website. Third-party transactions now account for almost 25% of all US transactions, and represent Amazon's fastest-growing and most profitable business segment. Rajaraman was also an inventor of the concept underlying Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk. Rajaraman and his business partner, Venky Harinarayan, co-founded Cambrian Ventures, an early stage VC fund, in 2000. Cambrian went on to back several companies later acquired by Google and has funded companies like Mobissimo, Aster Data Systems and TheFind.com.
Jeffrey David Ullman is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science (Emeritus) at Stanford University. He is also the CEO of Gradiance. Ullman's research interests include database theory, data integration, data mining and education using the information infrastructure. He is one of the founders of the field of database theory and was the doctoral advisor of an entire generation of students who later became leading database theorists in their own right. He was also the Ph.D. advisor of Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, and served on Google's technical advisory board. In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and in 2000 he was awarded the Knuth Prize. Ullman is also the co-recipient (with John Hopcroft) of the 2010 IEEE John von Neumann Medal, for 'laying the foundations for the fields of automata and language theory and many seminal contributions to theoretical computer science'.