Dr. Sharon Flank has devoted her career to commercializing advanced technologies, including search engines and data fusion. She has led technical efforts for successful commercial products, and at SRA (now CSRA) helped create companies later sold to AOL and Kodak. She rose to Chief Technology Officer at eMotion, an NLP-based image search company, helping customers monetize their assets and manage their media and metadata. She developed and patented advanced linguistic search technology, used (by OpenText) to manage digital photo and video libraries at Discovery, McDonald’s, Conservation International, ExxonMobil, and others.
In her consulting practice, Dr. Flank has provided strategic guidance in language technologies, knowledge management, bioinformatics, and data-rich applications. She founded InfraTrac in 2006, expanding on sensor-based protection technology. InfraTrac protects against fakes and mistakes using fingerprinting to protect the substance itself, with spectroscopy (light) as the detector. Dr. Flank licensed the first patent, secured funding from state, venture, federal and angel sources, assembled talent, developed product, coordinated sales and marketing, and invented and patented additional techniques, including for 3D printing.
Dr. Flank has an A.B. from Cornell and a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard. She holds ten patents, with several more pending, and has authored dozens of papers and presentations on the implementation of complex technologies.
