Jerry Kaplan

Kaplan is widely known as a serial entrepreneur, technical innovator, bestselling author, and futurist. He co-founded four Silicon Valley startups, two of which became publicly traded companies. His best-selling non-fiction novel "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" was selected by Business Week as one of the top ten business books of the year, was optioned to Sony Pictures, and is available in Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese. Kaplan has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Red Herring, and Upside, and is a frequent public speaker.

Kaplan is currently a Fellow at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. He also teaches Philosophy, Ethics, and Impact of Artificial Intelligence in the Computer Science Department, Stanford University. He holds a BA (1972) from the University of Chicago in History and Philosophy of Science, and an MSE (1975) and PhD (1979) in Computer and Information Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics, from the University of Pennsylvania.

Companies co-founded: Winster.com (social games, 2004); Onsale.com (online auctions, 1994); GO Corporation (tablet computers, 1987); and Teknowledge (expert systems, 1981).

Products co-invented: The Synergy (first all-digital keyboard instrument, used for the soundtrack of the movie TRON); Lotus Agenda (first personal Information manager); PenPoint (tablet operating system used in the first smartphone, AT&T's EO 440); the GO computer (first tablet computer) and Straight Talk (Symantec Corporation's first natural language query system). He is also co-inventor of the online auction (patents now owned by eBay) and is named on 12 U.S. patents.

Published research: He has published papers in refereed journals including Artificial Intelligence, Communications of the ACM, Computer Music Journal, The American Journal of Computational Linguistics, and ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

Awards: Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Northern California (1998); Governor's Electronic Commerce Advisory Council Member (under Pete Wilson, Governor of California, 1999); and an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from California International Business University, San Diego, California (2004).