Jan Pedersen was on the staff of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for ten years, first working on statistical approaches to natural language processing, and later managing a research group in the area of Information Access. He is associated with a number of information access inventions, most notably the Scatter-Gather, cluster-based, document browsing paradigm. In 1996 Jan Pedersen joined Verity Inc., a leading vendor of text retrieval software, as manager of the Advanced Technology Group. The prototyping efforts of this group culminated in a product release of the Verity Knowledge Organizer early in 1998. Jan Pedersen is currently Director, Search Products at Infoseek Corp.