Whova is built upon proprietary big data analytics and mining technology developed by University of California, San Diego to provide âpeople researchâ, instead of âname searchâ, i.e., it helps users find information associated with a target person, instead of the Internet pages that contain the personâs name and other keywords typed in a search box. Whova provides this advanced capability by first aggregating data from the whole internet, then automatically disambiguating different people of the same name, and finally grouping the information of the same person together to automatically build an Internet profile for the searched person. In addition, whova also infers people connection from various data sources. Different from the connections in social network websites, these connections are associated with real world relationships such as co-authors, co-inventors, colleagues, etc. Whova began as a research project in 2011 at the Opera research group led by Professor Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California, San Diego. In Oct 2012, the UCSD research team has received a grant from US National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) to investigate the commercialization feasibility of its people disambiguation technology. In Sept 2012, the research team spun off Whova LLC as a start-up. Whova has obtained a license from UCSD for the proprietary technology developed by the research team and iNov 2012, it released the browser plugins for Linkedin profiles and Google Search to beta users . In March 2013, firm released the first version of the Whova Professional People Search for iPhone and two months later, it released the same version for Android app and also launched the website. In July 2013, Whova has received an NSF SBIR further to accelerate its development of people search and automatic name disambiguation technology. In Oct 2013. it released a new app called Whova-Event for iPhone and
