Oracle and eBay consultant to speak at Law School on Thursday, April 25

A technology wizard who consults for Oracle and regularly designs advanced Internet search mechanisms will be speaking at the William S. Richardson School of Law on Thursday, April 25 at 4 p.m. in Classroom 3.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Franz Guenthner, a professor at what many consider Germany’s leading University - the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich – is one of the world’s leading researchers and authorities in advanced search technologies based on linguistic models.

In Guenthner’s talk at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Law School, he will speak specifically about the Virtual Tribunal project that enables online users to pull up video and transcripts of ongoing or recent war crimes trials, including those involving the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Guenthner, who also consults for eBay, HP, and Samsung among many others, will demonstrate how the system works during the talk.

Law Dean Avi Soifer said the Law School is delighted to be able to host such a remarkable researcher.

“His work is likely to be very important for the future of legal research, as well as research in many other fields,” said Soifer, “and we currently have particular interest in how it could fit into the Obama Presidential Center project we are working on right now.”

Professor David Cohen, who heads the War Crimes Studies Center now headquartered at the UH Mānoa Law School and the East-West Center and also affiliated with UC-Berkeley, said the Virtual Tribunal “is a highly innovative multi-media, multi-lingual software platform that provides interfaces tailored to the needs and abilities of different user groups.”

Cohen, who has collaborated with Guenthner on several other projects as well, added: “We have made agreements with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, The Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the ICTY to bring their databases of court documents, videos and transcripts onto the VT platform and to develop interfaces for different national and international user groups.”

(The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – ICTY - was formed by the United Nations in 1993 and was the first international war crimes tribunal after those held in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II. It has charged more than 160 people with atrocities committed in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s and 60 people already have been convicted.)

Guenthner has built a wide range of databases ranging from one for the largest publishing house in Germany to one that is the largest scientific database in the world. He will answer questions about how the Virtual Tribunal technology could be utilized at UH - including for special library collections or in educational modules for Hawai‘i schools.

Guenthner has a particular interest in Hawai’i because he lived here from the age of 8 to 16, and attended St. Louis High School.

He graduated from an American university, but his academic career is anchored in Germany. He worked with Cohen and the Hoover Library and Archive at Stanford University over the past several years on a number of projects, including the Virtual Tribunal.