No newcomer to the industry, Yvan began his career in technology in 1989 and until January 2002, was the Executive Vice President of Mitra Imaging Inc. There he helped grow the firm to a 400-person global technology leader in the healthcare informatics industry, and successfully led the sale of the company to Agfa in 2002. Prior to that he was president of Taaz Corp., a company offering marketing, software documentation and business consulting services to many technology clients.

Yvan is also currently Chairman, investor, and advisor of a Toronto-based global online music company, The Official Community Corporation, and was one of the early driving forces behind Communitech, Waterloo’s technology association. Today, Communitech is a multimillion-dollar operation and is one of the leading organizations of its kind in North America.

He has an Honors Bachelor of Business Administration and a Master of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University and has also won several awards – most recently the 2009 Wilfrid Laurier University MBA Alumnus of the Year award.

Peter’s vision is manifested in “thought networking” as an essential aspect of our digital lives. He has several patents and patents pending covering foundational technologies and applications within knowledge representation, with his work in facet analysis, semantic synthesis and adaptive classification systems underlying Primal Fusion’s technology platform.

Before starting Primal, Peter was Co-Founder, CEO, and later CTO of Indimensions Entertainment Group (now The Official Community Corporation), a global network of online communities for major recording artists.

As a technologist, Peter continues his collaborations on the semantic technology platform at Primal. He has designed and managed development projects across a range of e-business initiatives, including taxonomy and content management, e-commerce, and community applications. Past work includes one of the entertainment industry’s first B2B Internet marketplaces.

Peter began programming computers at age 11. He started his academic studies in engineering and science, eventually switching to business to support his entrepreneurial ambitions. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto.

In 2009, Peter was named a member of Waterloo Region Record’s 40 Under 40, as one of the region’s most inspiring young leaders. He is a member of information sciences advisory board for The Lifeboat Foundation, and a Loran Award mentor for The Canadian Merit Scholarship Foundation. As a thought leader, he has spoken at numerous conferences, including the Semantic Technology Conference, Web 3.0, and IA Summit.

Check out his ideas on the Primal blog and follow him on Twitter and Delicious @petersweeney.

As a former advisor to both the Obama-Biden USPTO agency review team and the Under Secretary of Commerce for IP, Erin-Michael was a key policy official responsible for advising the Administration in the development and coordination of US intellectual property policy.

Erin-Michael has been the past head of intellectual property for a number of venture-backed IT companies and has several years experience in IP and product management at a Fortune 50 company.

As Director of Intellectual Property at OQO, Erin-Michael increased IP valuation $100M+ year-over-year. At E.I. DuPont de Nemours, he transformed a $1.4B division’s patent estate into a strategic tool for business managers, identifying 77 new product opportunities.

As a former Patent Examiner with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, he determined patentability for over 100 inventions.

Erin-Michael is a founding member of the CIPO Manifesto Working Group, IAM Magazine, London U.K. and is a sought-after speaker and panelist on IP business-related issues.

Erin-Michael is a former graduate student in Applied Physics at Johns Hopkins University and has a B.S. Astronomy and B.A. Physics from Benedictine College.

Before joining Primal, Melissa was Controller with Bend All Automotive, a supplier of automotive components and automation tooling equipment. During her 10 years there, she adapted new processes as the company tripled in size, was part of the management buy-out of Bend All and helped sell the firm to a global company.

While working with KPMG, she obtained her Chartered Accountant designation and was responsible for the audits of several public companies in a variety of industries. And before all of this, she obtained a Bachelor of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University.

If that weren’t enough, Melissa has also been a member of many volunteer organizations, and currently sits on the Boards of Family & Children’s Services Foundation.

Internally, Anne provides the product strategy and technical roadmap for the platform, driving new product initiatives and positioning. Outwardly, Anne is actively involved in Primal’s thought leadership and business development activities.

Throughout her career, Anne’s focus has been on team leadership and technical excellence. Prior to joining Primal, Anne was a Schema Architect and Ontologist with Microsoft, contributing knowledge engineering and semantic system design to next generation Microsoft products. Anne began her career at Cycorp in Austin, Texas, where she was a contributor to Cycorp’s knowledge base and later became the Manager of Documentation and Training. After Cycorp, Anne joined Ingenuity Systems as employee number six, eventually leading a cross-disciplinary team in the development of Ingenuity’s semantic content platform. After Ingenuity, Anne led a research team working in information management and collaborative technologies at Boeing Phantom Works.

Anne’s interest in semantic technologies began during her undergraduate years, when she started drawing connections between ideas in mathematics, logic, philosophy and artificial intelligence. She pursued these interests in graduate school, and after receiving her doctorate, she was surprised to find that machine-readable semantics was more than theoretical.

Anne graduated from Tulane University (Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, Master of Arts in Philosophy) and University of Virginia (PhD in Philosophy with an emphasis on philosophy of language and logic).

His past research activities include top-k and rank-aware query processing, managing uncertain and probabilistic databases, self-managing databases, indexing techniques and spatial databases.

A co-holder of four patents, Ihab’s awards include an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2008) and an IBM CAS Faculty Fellowship since 2006. An Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, he received his PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2004.

As an Engineering Director at Unisys for the past decade, he has applied metadata concepts and information management technologies to build transactional processing solutions for its clients world-wide.

At Ontek Corporation, he participated in and led a number of public and private research and development projects, pioneering the use of semantic technologies for manufacturing, healthcare and transportation systems. And while at Price Waterhouse, he served as an IT Consultant and Practice Leader for the US Pacific region and a national Advanced Technology practice.

A sought-after speaker, he frequently addresses student associations and campus recruiting events.

Tony graduated Phi Beta Kappa/Beta Gamma Sigma with a BS in Industrial Management/Computer Science from Purdue University