Morten Middelfart is a Danish-born, American entrepreneur, inventor, and technologist. He is best known for designing the TARGITsoftware for business intelligence and analytics. Middelfart is currently the founder/Chief Data Scientist of Lumina Analytics, CIO of Genomic Expression and founder of Social Quant. These organizations implement the data analytics techniques Middelfart has developed throughout his career. With seven U.S. patents for his inventions in business intelligence and analytics software, Middelfart holds the most patents of any Danish person working in software. Middelfart holds an MBA from Henley Management College, a PhD from Rushmore University, and a PhD from Aalborg University. Middelfart founded an analytics company, Morton Systems, in 1996, and became CTO of TARGIT following TARGIT's acquisition of his business in 1997. After the acquisition, TARGIT transitioned from reselling enterprise software systems to developing and selling business intelligence and analytics software. In 2014, Middelfart left TARGIT and founded Social Quant, a social media optimization service that uses analytics to find users. In 2015, Middelfart joined Genomic Expressions, which uses data analytics to offer treatment ideas for cancer patients. Also in 2015, Middelfart cofounded Lumina Analytics, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to help clients uncover risk by sifting through massive amounts of information.
Inventions
Middelfart holds seven U.S. patents for developments within business intelligence and analytics software, placing him among the top 1.8% of all active inventors. His inventions pertain primarily to graphical representation of OLAP-structured of data within a business intelligence and analytics platform, methods of retrieving data from the platform, and the processing of natural language and multi-lingual queries to the data warehouse through the platform. Middelfart is the most prolific Danish inventor in the field of database technology. In addition to his patents, Middelfart is a pioneer in the use of the OODA loop process within business intelligence and data warehousing. The process, as first developed by USAF Colonel John Boyd, describes the way individuals and organizations gather information, decide on a course of action based on that information, and carry out the decision. Middelfart applied this concept to enterprise decision-making and crafted the TARGIT business intelligence software to incorporate the OODA loop's stages. Middelfart was recently named a finalist for a "CIO of the Year" award near his home in Tampa Bay. Middelfart has one patent application pending with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, focused on the intelligent processing of user queries in natural language into a business intelligence platform. He is also directing further research into "human-computer synergy", Big Data, and how computing power and human interaction can be used to make faster, more effective decisions. Middelfart's work has been cited in work dedicated to exploring knowledge base inspection. He has also published several peer-reviewed articles that outline his philosophy and technological developments in detail.
Personal life
Middelfart is an active skydiver, with more than 1600 skydives and BASE jumps to his name. Skydiving plays a role in his "facts beat fear" philosophy, which also informs aspects of his research.
