Grefenstette, who received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, has been a fixture of the information retrieval and natural language processing fields since 1988. A highly cited author and frequent member of international conference committees, he possesses 15 patents in the U.S. including the design of a photocopier for cross language information retrieval (US 6,396,951), for finding experts in a company by mining Web usage (US 6,446,035) and for creating documents that enrich themselves (US 6,732,090).

Most recently, Grefenstette worked as a senior expert at CEA (the Atomic Energy Commission - an applied research center in France). Before that, he worked as an engineer at Honeywell Bull, taught at the University of Tours and worked as a principal scientist at Xerox Research and Clairvoyance Corporation.