Thomas Potok

Dr. Thomas E. Potok is the founder and leader of the Computational Data Analytics Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The CDA group was formed in 2000, and currently has 30 research staff and an annual budget of $10M. He is also a joint faculty member and the Associate Director of the Center for Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning (CISML) at University of Tennessee in the Computer Science department, and a joint faculty member in the Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. He is currently a principle investigator on a number of projects involving large-scale data analytics, and is the co-inventor of the Piranha text analysis software system that won an R&D 100 Award in 2007 (Oscars of Invention), and a con-inventor of the DTHSTR content-based recommender system that won an R&D 100 Award in 2013. In 2012 he co-founded and is the chief technology officer of the Global Security Information Analysts (GSIA) company formed to commercializing the Piranha and DTHSTR software. Prior to this he worked for 14 years at IBM’s Software Solutions Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where he held a number of positions and conducted research in software engineering productivity. He has a BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering all from North Carolina State University. He has published 140+ papers; received 13 issued patents, and serves on a number of journal editorial boards, and conference organizing and program committees.1996