Tarek Najm is a Technical Fellow working in the Search, Portal and Advertising Division at Microsoft.  Najm’s current areas of focus include Web Semantics, Data Mining and Knowledge Engineering.

A visionary architect, Najm founded and led worldwide development of several large-scale Web initiatives including:  Microsoft adCenter Advertising Platform, PubCenter Platform for Publishers, adCenter Labs, Audience Intelligence for Data mining and Data Warehousing.

Najm has been with Microsoft since 1996 and has held several  leadership positions in the Online Division including: Architect of online systems, Billing Group Manager, Director of Business Intelligence, General Manager of adCenter and PubCenter, Distinguished Engineer in charge of all Microsoft Advertising and Audience Intelligence systems including Display Advertising, Paid Search Advertising, Content Advertising and eMail Advertising platforms.

Najm is passionate about leveraging ‘data’ to advance the Web and build new platforms.  His current focus on Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web is an extension to his work and experience in the design of data-driven Advertising Systems, Data Mining, OLTP systems, Data Modeling, Distributed Systems, Massive Parallel Processing, and VLDB Data Warehousing systems.

Najm holds several patents in system design, advertising algorithms and data management. He participates in relevant industry conferences and is active in the entrepreneurial startup community.