Tom Gruber

Tom Gruber is an innovator in technologies that extend human intelligence. Building on early work in computer-mediated learning and artificial intelligence, he focuses on creating environments for collective intelligence.

He co-founded RealTravel, which aspires to be the best place on the web to share knowledge and experiences about travel. RealTravel.com provides an environment for a community of travel enthusiasts to create beautiful travel journals of their adventures, share them with friends and family, and find other like-minded travelers. People looking for information about where to go, where to stay, or what to do in their travels can learn from the authentic experiences of those who have been there.

Previously he was co-founder and CTO of Intraspect Software, which creates environments for professional people working together on line. Intraspect applications help people collaborate in large distributed communities, learn from each other, and continuously contribute to a collective body of knowledge. Intraspect is used by hundreds of corporate customers in Financial Services, Marketing Services, Professional Services, High Technology, and other globally distributed enterprises.

He is also a founder and Chief Scientist of Consider Solutions, a consultancy that helps Global 2000 companies to design and implement coordinated systems of technology, processes, and human organizations to maximize organizational effectiveness.

At Stanford University in the early 1990's, Gruber was a pioneer in the use of the Web for knowledge sharing and collaboration. He established the DARPA Knowledge Sharing Library, a web-based public exchange for ontologies, software, and knowledge bases. Gruber also led the Stanford team that invented and deployed the first Virtual Document applications on the web that generate natural language explanations in response to questions.

With colleagues at Stanford, Xerox PARC, and SRI, he designed systems that provide shared virtual spaces for collaborative work, agent-based collaborative engineering, and collaborative learning. To support the collaborations of the WWW research community, Gruber created HyperMail. HyperMail turns ordinary electronic mail into a web-based organizational memory. HyperMail was used as the archive and public forum for some of the key discussions that defined the emerging ideas of the early Web.

Tom is an advisor to interesting companies in financial services (Wall Street), enterprise collaboration (SocialText, Consider), social networking (LinkedIn), semantic web (Radar Networks), Natural Language Search (Powerset), mind mapping (Mindjet), life story sharing (OurStory), social compensation (OpenYear), social entrepreneurship (ChangingThePresent.org), and open content (the Internet Archive).