Jan Pieper is a part-time graduate student at UCSC. He holds a Diploma Engineering Degree in Computer Science from the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, Germany and is a full time employee at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA.

Jan joined IBM Almaden as a summer student in 2000. He enjoyed working on streaming media, service oriented architectures and the MPEG-7 standard so much, that he quickly applied for a full-time position. He spent most of his time at Almaden working on various aspects of semantic super computing, serving as the chief architect for WebFountain and contributing to the BBC SoundIndex and MONGOOSE projects. Jan’s current interests include social and collaboration software for the enterprise, data mining, data deduplication and cloud computing.