Gil Elbaz

Gil Elbaz is an amazing entrepreneur, founder of Applied Semantics, creator of Google's AdSense, Caltech Trustee, and CEO of Factual. He will be having a Q&A/talk with the eClub and Caltech Community on Tuesday, February 21st at 2:00pm in Beckman Behavioral Biology, Room 24. Biography Gil Elbaz is an accomplished entrepreneur and pioneer of natural-language technology and structured data ecosystems. Gil is passionate about building scalable information systems that drive innovative application development which ultimately enables better decision-making. In 1991, Gil earned his bachelor's degree from Caltech, with a double major in Engineering/Applied Science and Economics. After college, Gil worked in engineering roles at IBM, Sybase, and SGI. In 1998, he co-founded Applied Semantics (ASI). ASI helped define and build new addressable markets with its AdSense and other contextual advertising products. The company was acquired by Google in 2003, at which point Gil became Director of Engineering for the Santa Monica office. His work there helped establish Google's place as a leader in the field of online advertising. In 2007, Gil left Google to start Los Angeles-based Factual Inc. an open data platform founded to maximize data accuracy, transparency, and availability. Active in a number of nonprofit areas, Gil is on the board of trustees for the X Prize Foundation and Caltech, and a member of the Los Angeles Social Ventures Partners. He is also a member of the Advisory Council for Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. He and his wife, Elyssa, also manage the Elbaz Family Foundation, supporting environmental and educational causes.