Spock Awards $50,000 Grand Prize to Spock Challenge Winners

Competition Garnered Over 1500 Entries Across all Five Continents

Redwood City, CA - March 4, 2008 - Spock, the leading people search engine, announced today the winners of the Spock Challenge. A six-person team of researchers, faculty and students from Germany's Bauhaus University Weimar were awarded the $50,000 grand prize.

The challenge called for leading computer scientists and engineers to solve how to distinguish many people with the same name, e.g., Michael Jackson the singer from Michael Jackson the football player.

"With billions of documents and people online, we are now able to more precisely categorize and cluster web documents to unique individuals" said Jaideep Singh, Co-Founder & CEO of Spock. "Mapping named entities from documents to the correct person was the essence of the Spock Challenge, and the team from Germany did a tremendous job," added Singh.

According to Dr. Benno Stein, one of the team's leaders, "It took us eight months of effort and trying numerous approaches to reach our results."

"The techniques applied by the German team were very clever" said Professor Chris Manning of Stanford University's computer science department, a leading technical advisor to Spock and one of the contest's key judges.

The challenge, held from April - December 2007, gained enormous interest with over 1500 participants from around the world.

About the winning team

Click below to learn more about the Spock challenge winners:

Spock_challenge

About Spock

Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, Spock is a people search engine that organizes information around people to enable discovery and learning. With the vision of indexing everyone in the world, Spock is adding millions of people to its index everyday through its search engine technology and through community contribution. Spock is located in Silicon Valley and funded by leading venture capital firms.

To contact Spock, e-mail info@corp.spock.com