Perfect Market | About Us

Dr. Jay Budzik brings over a decade of unstructured information processing, product development, and intellectual property management experience to his role as Chief Technology Officer for Perfect Market. He was most recently Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Media River, Inc., which Perfect Market acquired in 2008. At Media River, Jay led the company's research and development efforts, filing 13 patent applications to protect his inventions, and spearheaded the company's transition from enterprise software to online marketing services. Before Media River, Jay was a computer scientist at Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory, where he co-invented fundamental intellectual property in contextual search. He led a wide array of research projects, including early versions of the Watson contextual search agent, and a community-powered question answering system used by delegates at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. He is widely published on topics ranging from groupware to intelligent agents. Jay has delivered demonstrations and lectures to audiences ranging from international research groups to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, including invited talks at the MIT Media Lab, the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, and the American Society for Information Science. Articles on his work have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times, WGN-TV and L'Ordinateur Individuel.

Jay earned a B.S. with both general honors and honors in computer science from The College of The University of Chicago, and holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, where he was a Presidential Fellow. He also serves on the board of trustees of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), an internationally-recognized teaching and learning laboratory.