About
Individual contributor, systems architect, and technology manager with extensive experience leading teams in high-tech startups as CEO, CTO, and Product Manager.
Background: Over 14 years architecting cloud enterprise IT platforms to reengineer business processes. Subject matter expertise in intellectual property, image/document processing, augmented cognition, and mechatronic systems.
Civic Architecture
Beyond my nonprofit work, I practice civic architecture independently, applying systems thinking to public challenges. My goal is to identify structural optimizations in both physical infrastructure and legal frameworks.
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Transit Research: I invent algorithms that let riders transfer between shared autonomous vehicles, and I build the traffic simulation that tests them. My focus is capacity laddering, a variant of trunk-and-feeder transit: small vehicles gather riders near their doors and hand them off to larger vehicles for the middle of the trip, with transfer places and times chosen as demand changes rather than fixed in advance. The goal is door-to-door convenience with the efficiency of a trunk line, so that autonomous vehicles strengthen public transit instead of adding private traffic.
The simulation is being extended to weekday-morning traffic across the nine Bay Area counties. It is checked against standard traffic-flow theory and will be calibrated to public data, including freeway detector counts, bridge crossing counts, and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's regional travel model.
Contact for Civic Architecture queries
For academic collaboration or policy matters:
Experience
Chief Executive Officer | Olivann
Mar 2013 – Present | Alameda, CAI lead the strategic and technical operations of Olivann, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to environmental research and psychological services. My role is focused on:
- Technical R&D: Co-leading with Prof. Sanjai Parikh, UC Davis, an indefinite-duration (e.g. multi-decade) biochar field trial in Gualala, CA, exploring how various biochars influence non-pyrogenic soil organic carbon, how biochar migrates, and to what degree biochar's effects are due to water storage vs. other characteristics.
- Human Services: Overseeing programs that provide psychology services to low-income people and to public servants suffering from trauma.
Note: Olivann is a research and service organization. My work at Olivann is non-partisan and distinct from my independent civic architecture work.
Visit Olivann.org →Founder & CTO | Edyt
Oct 2005 – Present | San Francisco Bay AreaExecutive Leadership: Led customer discovery and business development, earning a $10M product license and $4M in service contracts. Secured $1.75M in NSF grants as Principal Investigator.
Technical Architecture: Architected novel case management systems deployed into production at the European Patent Office (EPO). Proposed examination solutions for the USPTO providing rapid image display and semantic propagation between PDF and XML formats.
Director of Engineering | Vapore Inc.
Dec 2003 – Oct 2004 | Richmond, CAManaged engineering for a high-tech ceramics startup. Architected characterization systems requiring optical sensing, high-power electronics, and precision fluid metering. Directed in-house manufacture and testing of systems for international markets (Korea, Japan).
Founder & CEO | Tactility Inc.
May 2000 – Dec 2003 | San Francisco Bay AreaFounded a mechatronics research company specializing in human-machine interface design. Marketed novel automated haptic technologies to senior management at Panasonic and Omron (Japan). Guest lectured on robotics at UC Berkeley Engineering school.
Senior Member of Technical Staff | Hewlett Packard Labs
Nov 1995 – Mar 2000 | Palo Alto, CA, Bristol, UK & Greeley, COProminent contributor to the Capshare untethered, solid-state scanner. Transferred technology and implemented navigation algorithms as ASIC cores as part of a $40M development effort. Invented optical microscopy navigation systems later transferred to Microsoft & Logitech, used in billions of optical mice.
Patents & Intellectual Property
Inventor on 18 patent families across document engineering, mechatronics, and imaging.
Document Engineering & SemanticsEducation & Service
Stanford University
MS, Mechanical Engineering (Mechatronics) | Smart Product Design Lab
BS, Electrical Engineering | Computer Hardware
The Dalton School | High School Diploma
Board Member | Real Industry
Apr 2013 – Dec 2019Co-founded initiatives to incubate academic research spinouts in collaboration with the National Science Foundation. Launched the "Real Startup" university entrepreneurship program and led initiatives bringing technology industry leaders to recruit at non-elite colleges and universities.