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Franciscan University of Steubenville owns and administers the patent rights to Pryvit technology. Franciscan attracts students from all 50 states and about 40 other countries. It offers over 30 liberal arts, pre-professional, and professional undergraduate programs, plus a variety of Master's degree specializations.

Marpex Inc. was incorporated in Ontario in 1976. When headquarters were moved in 1992 to Steubenville, Marpex was established as an S-corp in the state of Ohio. From its inception Marpex has focused on computational linguistic solutions. The company's first search engine, named FindIt, was developed in 1985 for Reteaco Inc. of Willowdale, Ontario. FindIt was used by Reteaco to create a wide variety of government and private enterprise databases on CD-ROMs. In a change of ownership of Reteaco, Marpex Inc. retained rights to FindIt for the religious market, and was a world leader in direct and sub-contract sales of biblical databases until about 1995. Marpex Inc. is run by Douglas Lowry and his son Kevin Lowry.

Douglas Lowry is the founder and president of Marpex Inc. He holds a Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1975 to 1992 he was a Clerk of General Assembly of The Presbyterian Church in Canada. During the same period, he was involved in a variety of high tech businesses -- founding President of Digital Video Systems, Chief Scientist and later Chairman of the Board of Reteaco Inc., and President of Marpex Inc. In 1989-90 and continuously since 1993 he has taught full time in the Department of Accounting and Business at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. His current position is Professor of Business and Marketing. He wrote the patent application for Proximity Search during the Christmas 2003 break. Starting during the summer of 2004 he plans to work full time on expanding the scale of the Proximity Search engine so that it may compete directly among the major Internet search engines.

Kevin Lowry, CPA started his career in information technology and purchasing for Sony of Canada, Ltd. He has 13 years experience in public accounting and industry positions. Kevin is currently Director of Finance and Accounting of CompManagement near Columbus, Ohio.

Susan McFadden has recently joined in the effort, taking on a variety of tasks -- environmental scanning, marketing research, and lead generation.

Since 1994 five major projects have dominated the research efforts of Marpex Inc.

1. Learning tools for students at Franciscan University
2. Secure software rental techniques
3. Fragmentation/dispersion methods to transmit or store confidential materials on the Internet
4. Efficient proximity search in large text data sets
5. Combination of ultra-compressed bit trees with proximity techniques for Internet search.

Marpex Inc. made a gift of the rights for the third project (trade named "Pryvit") to Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. Marpex Inc. retains ownership of the other technologies that it has developed. Franciscan University and Marpex Inc. are collaborating in bringing these technologies to the academic and business communities.