Pawel Lewicki

In a recent interview, Lewicki emphasized that StatSoft’s corporate culture remains focused on long-term research and altruism rather than profits: "Our mission is to create value and to make the world a better place, and analytics contribute directly to that. Our employees' biggest reward is to see that what we're doing works and is making a difference."

Paul (Pawel) Lewicki is a cognitive scientist, an entrepreneur, and investor. He was a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Tulsa from 1984 through 2009, where he established the Nonconscious Information Processing Laboratory. After leaving the University in 2009, he assumed the full-time role of CEO of StatSoft, a multinational analytics software company that he founded and where he was a majority shareholder. On March 24, 2014, StatSoft was sold to Dell.

Lewicki was the Chief Executive Officer and President of StatSoft; on March 24, 2014, StatSoft was acquired by Dell.

After the sale of StatSoft to Dell in 2014, Lewicki focused on applications of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, that has been traditionally slower in adopting big data learning and data mining, and he co-founded Holo Surgical Inc. (a company that developed technology based on Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality to provide surgeons and later robots with synthetic vision, that allow them to see internal organs as if the patient had no skin, muscles, or connective tissue and thus to perform complex surgeries using minimally invasive techniques) and Dystrogen Therapeutics Inc. (a company that develops treatments for rare diseases based on high-tech therapies using the chimeric cells and RNAi platforms).

In the fall of 2012, Lewicki led the “Free Enterprise Software for Struggling European Economies” initiative, where StatSoft is installing free enterprise systems to companies in Greece, Portugal, and Spain to boost their productivity and competitiveness, and to facilitate their recovery. Lewicki has directed an open letter to fellow CEOs of US software companies urging them to join the initiative.

This approach became popular and rapidly adopted by the corporate world as so-called “predictive data mining” starting in the late 1990s and StatSoft’s STATISTICA Data Miner is now one of the widely used enterprise-level software systems for data mining and predictive analytics.

Lewicki began to write data analysis software for personal computers around 1984. He found the mainframe data analysis software difficult to use and needed a tool to analyze his research data. He gave this software away for free to colleagues, who provided positive feedback and this led him to incorporate StatSoft in 1984. StatSoft then expanded into enterprise-scale predictive analytics software and, according to the company website, is now an international analytic solution software provider with more than 1,000,000 users and 30 offices worldwide.