Dr. Rafsky, who earned his Ph.D. in statistics from Yale in 1974 and his A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton in 1970, is a well-known innovator and entrepreneur in the on-line information industry. He has led four successful new ventures, taking overall responsibility for securing funding, setting strategic direction, and building infrastructures.
At Automatic Data Processing, from 1978 through 1982, he conceived, planned, negotiated and then served as Managing Director of ECONALYST, the joint venture between ADP and Alan Greenspan’s economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan. In 1982, Dr. Rafsky founded GemNet, the software company that wrote FAME, a leading time series data banking and econometric analysis package. In 1984, Citibank acquired GemNet. Dr. Rafsky served as President of the now re-named FAME Software Corporation. In 1985, Dr. Rafsky co-founded Gari Software Associates, an organization specializing in financial data base and real-time news integration for Wall Street. Dow Jones acquired Gari; Dr. Rafsky served as president of Gari from 1985 to 1998. In 1998, Dr. Rafsky led an MBO of Gari Software from Dow Jones, and sold the resulting entity to WavePhore. Merging this software base with the Internet news delivery systems of Mainstream Data, also acquired by WavePhore, he created MediaXpress, the company’s flagship product, and pioneered the formation of xmlnews.org. Named CTO of Wavo (WavePhore’s new name), Dr. Rafsky lead news software development until early 2001 when he formed Acquire Media Corporation and acquired the MediaXpress assets, and in 2007 the assets of NewsEdge, formerly a division of Thomson Corporation.
In addition to his entrepreneurial activities, Dr. Rafsky maintains research interests in a number of technical fields, including multivariate data analysis, NLP/text categorization/taxonomic tagging, graphics/visualization, computational statistics, finance, and portfolio theory. Papers in finance and portfolio theory have appeared in Econometrica and Management Science. Papers in multivariate analysis and graphics have appeared in the Annals of Statistics and JASA (Journal of the American Statistical Association). Dr. Rafsky was co-recipient of the 1980 Theory and Methods Award from the American Statistical Association, has been an adjunct faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Stevens Institute, and an invited speaker at major universities (Carnegie Mellon, Yale, and others) and meetings (ASA, ComStat, and COMDEX).