Raul Valdes-Perez, Ph.D.
~ Outstanding Alumni Career Achievement

1980 B.S. Computer Science and Engineering. 1982 M.S. Engineering. 1991 Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University

The career achievements of Dr. Raul Valdes-Perez bring together entrepreneurial talent, dedication to science and academic excellence, and involvement in his community.

After graduating from UIC , Raul sought adventure in Brazil, writing software, was a research scientist at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and achieved his cherished dream of earning a Ph.D. in computer science under Carnegie Mellon Nobel Prize laureate, Turing Award recipient, and artificial intelligence pioneer Herbert A. Simon . Presently an adjunct associate professor, Raul has been a faculty member in his home-department since 1991. His research on new methods and applications of knowledge discovery produced nearly 50 journal articles crossing the fields of natural, social and computer science. Raul has served on the National Science Foundation advisory committee for social, behavioral and economic sciences and was a principal investigator on six NSF grants.

As President and Cofounder of Vivísimo, Inc., whose name translates as lively from Spanish and Portuguese, Raul produces intelligent software that allows enterprises to organize information from anywhere, at any time, in any language. Clusty.com , its breakthrough meta-search clustering search engine, is a "crawler" that locates Web pages and challenges the way in which many Internet search engines are structured. Over 10 percent of all Internet searches are now "clustered" using Vivísimo technology.

Since founding Vivísimo in 2000, Raul was recognized as a top-ten favorite among readers of Inc. magazine for entrepreneur of the year. His insights on Internet research and clustering appear in a regular column in CIO magazine on-line, and he was lauded three times as one of the top 50 CEOs by Hispanic Engineer magazine. Raul was also a CEO of the year finalist in the Pittsburgh Technology Council Tech 50 awards in 2005.

Raul was represented at the ceremony by his parents, Thomas and Hilda Valdes-Booth. Thomas delighted the audience, reporting "I am especially pleased to be here because as an electrical engineer, I had a small role in UIC 's development, since I worked on the design of the lighting system in UIC 's lecture rooms while at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in the early 1960's. I never heard any complaints from my son or my daughter Maria, a 1985 chemical engineering graduate of this same college, so I guess the lighting held up well enough."