The main goal of Text By the Bay is connecting the best NLP academics with the best practitioners. The best academics build open-source tools that startups and enterprises can take to production quickly, and that they can learn and improve. In return, web-scale production leads to massive datasets and use cases that improve the software. The last year saw multiple NLP-centric companies founded and we want to bring them together.

We start this conference small with as much help form the community as we can gather. First, we need volunteers to help organize it. We also need a venue fitting 200-300 people for a day or two. And we need great sponsors -- email us at text@bythebay.io if you can help in one of these areas!

Mark Liberman

Mark (@mark_liberman) is a Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Mark is also the Director of Linguistic Data Consortium. His research interests include corpus-based phonetics, the phonology and phonetics of lexical tone, and its relationship to intonation; gestural, prosodic, morphological and syntactic ways of marking focus, and their use in discourse; and formal models for linguistic annotation. Mark blogs at Language Log.

Aaron Patzer

Aaron (@apatzer) is the founder and CEO of Fountain.com, which uses Natural Language Processing to route users to experts. Prior to that he was the founder and CEO of Mint.com, sold to Intuit. Aaron started coding Fountain.com in Scala himself, and a year later presented the system with his co-founder Jean at SF Scala.