Spock, the people search engine, recently announced 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 prize.

The challenge called for leading computer scientists, academics and engineers to solve one of the most interesting problems in computer science: Entity Resolution, or 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.

For additional information, please visit: www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_spock_challenge_winner.

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