Jan O. Pedersen is currently Chief Scientist for Core Search at Microsoft. Pedersen began his career at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he managed a research program on information access technologies. In 1996 he joined Verity (recently purchased by Autonomy) to manage their advanced technology program.
He is credited with more than ten issued patents and has authored more than twenty refereed publications on information access topics, seven of which are in the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) proceedings.