About Toby Segaran
Toby Segaran was born in Auckland, New Zealand and grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand. He represented New Zealand once in the International Physics Olympiad and twice in the SEARCC International Schools Software Competition (SISC). His SISC team took 1st place in 1994 and 2nd place in 1995.
He moved to Boston when he was 17 to get a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While at MIT he spent one year at Oxford University studying History and Mathematics.
After college he moved to North Carolina and started a biotech software company, originally called ArrayEx and later called Incellico. It was acquired in 2003 by Genstruct, a systems biology company in Boston. He worked at Genstruct for 4.5 years before deciding that he really wanted to live in San Francisco.
While living in Boston, he wrote a book called Programming Collective Intelligence, which was published by O'Reilly Media in August, 2007. As of June, 2008, it had sold approximately 18,000 copies, and had been translated into three different languages. It has received many rave reviews.
He now works at Metaweb Technologies in San Francisco. Toby develops techniques to retrieve, parse and reconcile large public datasets. These are loaded into Freebase, a free online semantic database.
Toby speaks at many conferences his recent appearances were at OSCON, Web 2.0 Expo and Web 2.0 events in Berlin, New York, and Tokyo and Money Tech. Segaran is the recipient of a National Interest Waiver for Persons of Exceptional Ability.
He is currently working on a new book on Semantic Programming. He is also working to advance the idea that open-data will be one of the defining concepts in Information Technology in the near future.
Toby Segaran's Books
Programming Collective Intelligence Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
Toby Segaran in The News
- Toby Segaran's interview with Oreilly
- An interview of Toby on Web 2.0 expo blog
- Toby's talk at Web 2.0 NY
