Janko Mršić-Flögel

Founder and director

Dr. Janko Mršić-Flögel has established the Institute for Informatical Innovations. As a successful entrepreneur he has been managing his own companies since he was seventeen, and as early as 1993 he was actively developing the first SMS, WAP and Bluetooth services.

Dr Mršić-Flögel is an acknowledged expert on software and systems design. As co-creator and lecturer of the multi-media systems course at Imperial College, London, he has a valuable insight into state-of-the-art research. He has authored and been designated as inventor, on many patent applications relating to telecommunications and neural systems. As well as pioneering some of the data and short message services now available in GSM, he is an active researcher in the field of mobile computing. His Ph.D. thesis was written on neural networks and he continues to publish academic papers.

Bill Yeager

Member of the Scientific Board

William " Bill " Yeager (born 16 June 1940, San Francisco) is an American engineer. He is best-known for his development of the first multiple-protocol router software during his 20 year tenure at Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Laboratory. The code was licenced by upstart Cisco Systems in 1987 and comprised the core of the first Cisco IOS. He is also known for his role in the creation of the IMAP mail protocol, and for writing the ttyftp serial line file transfer program, which was developed into the MacIntosh version of the Kermit (protocol) at Columbia University. He has also worked 5 years for NASA Ames Research Center and 10 years at Sun Microsystems. At Sun as the CTO of Project JXTA he filed 38 US Patents, and as Chief Scientist at Peerouette, Inc., 2 US and 2 European Union Patents. He has so far been granted 11 US Patents 4 of which are on High Performance Email Servers, and 6 on P2P. Of the filed patents 36 are on Peer-to-Peer technology.

He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964; his master's degree in mathematics from San Jose State University in San Jose, California, in 1966; and completed his doctoral course work at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in 1970. Then decided to abandon mathematics for a career in software engineering and research to the skepticism of his thesis advisor because Bill thought the future was in computing.

David Levy

Member of the Scientific Board

David obtained a BSc in Pure Maths, Physics and Statistics from St Andrew’s University, Scotland. David started his career in 1967 at the University of Glasgow, Computer Science Department, teaching computer programming. Between 1971 and 1978 he was a professional chess player and writer. During the latter part of that period he was also a consultant on a computer chess project to Texas Instruments. In 1978 David founded his own embedded systems development business. Principal products have been strategy games programs for embedded products, interactive TV systems, consultancy services on strategy games and similar projects. He is understood to be currently supplying the software for more than half of the chess computers being sold worldwide.

In 1997 David’s work in Artificial Intelligence was recognised when he won the Loebner Prize. This competition is widely regarded as the World Championship for conversational software, with the winner being the most humanlike program. The prize was inaugurated by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Research. The competition is based on the “Turing Test” in Artificial Intelligence – the judges converse with each of the entries and with one or more humans, all via terminals so as to hide the identity of each conversational partner. The judges then rank each of the terminals from “most humanlike” to “least humanlike” and the program with the highest average ranking is the winner.

Away from mainstream commercial business, David is founder and chief organiser of the annual Mind Sports Olympiad, an organisation is dedicated to the spread and popularization of all Mind Sports and Mental Skills via regular real-world competitions. In 1992 and 1994 he was co-organiser of the Man versus Machine World Checkers Championship matches in London and Boston, where “Chinook” became the first computer program to win a human world championship, a feat recognised in the Guinness Book of World Records. He has twice co-organised a World Chess Championship match in London. Garry Kasparov versus Anatoly Karpov in 1986 and Kasparov versus Nigel Short in 1993. He is President of the International Computer Games association and was Chairman of the Rules and Arbitration Committee at Kasparov’s match against the Deep Junior chess program in New York in 2003.