Ontolog Forum
Norman Winarsky
Norman D. Winarsky, Ph.D.
VP, SRI Ventures
Menlo Park, California, USA.
Norman Winarsky is Vice President of SRI Ventures at SRI International. As such he is responsible for creating SRIs highest value opportunities. He is a founder of SRIs venture process, including venture and license incubation, seed funding, the Entrepreneur-In-Residence program, and venture capital engagement. He chairs SRIs Commercialization Board and the Venture Advisory Board, a partnership with the venture capital community that develops early-stage investment opportunities. This year he is also a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, conducting research on regions of innovation, with a particular focus on Japan.
Winarsky helped found approximately 30 ventures, holds three patents with several pending. He has a particular interest in natural language, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. (See http://nyti.ms/90nHFm) Most recently, he was co-founder and board member of Siri, which was spun out from SRI in January 2008, and acquired by Apple in April 2010. He is also Chairman of the University of Chicago Visiting Committee for the Physical Sciences Division.
Winarsky was a member of the National Academy Committee on Forecasting Future Disruptive Technologies, a National Science Foundation Fellow, an invited member of the mathematics department of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey, and an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at SUNY at Albany.
He and his team received an Emmy Award in 2000 for outstanding Achievement in technological advancement. In addition, Winarsky has received numerous SRI and RCA awards, including RCAs highest honor, the Sarnoff Award, for his work in developing a complete simulation of an electron optics system.
Winarsky graduated with a B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and was awarded Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.