Soft Matter Physics

• I defended my dissertation in biophysics titled "Ordering of Curving Interfaces"
  • Here is video of my defense presentation.
  • I'm very grateful to my advisor Mehran Kardar, as well as Jemal Guven and my thesis committee members Nikta Fakhri and Wolfgang Ketterle.
  • The Hertz Foundation has changed my life in wonderful ways multiple times in the last 25 years.
  • Here are slides and in player format.
• Patterns on membranes, e.g. Defects in nematic membranes can buckle into pseudospheres (pre-print) and Pinning of Diffusional Instabilities by Non-Uniform Curvature (pre-print).
• Mathematica animation of "charge" of a topological defect.

Biodiversity

• Now that lab-grown wood is a thing, can everyone start homebrewing dimensional lumber to sequester carbon instead of logging? Like growing spirulina but with lignin?
• I'm delighted to be helping LaHave Coastal protect coastal Acadian forests.
• In 1995, I joined Team Lux, the solar car team at Yale. We raced Lux Aeterna in Sunrayce 97. Team Lux was my first startup experience and one of the neatest groups of people ever.

Information Retrieval

• AI Maturity Model for Production (AIM2prod) (pptx)
• VP of Collaborative AI at Salesforce 2019-2023.
• CEO and a cofounder at Diffeo, which Salesforce acquired in 2019.
• Helped NIST organize the search engine evaluations TREC Knowledge Base Acceleration (KBA) and TREC Dynamic Domain in the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC).
• CEO, CTO, and cofounder of MetaCarta, which Nokia acquired. I was Chief Architect for Search at Nokia, which later became HERE.com
• Google Scholar lists my patents
• You can reach me through LinkedIn

Mapping

• As CTO at MetaCarta, I helped a brilliant team launch openlayers.org and love mapping technologies of all kinds.
• Drone-based mapping is revolutionizing our understanding of Earth, and I'm interested in using drones to automatically survey wetlands. I recently passed the FAA's Part 107 test for flying "small Unmanned Aircraft Systems" (sUAS).
• Checkout the Map Warper that grew out of a prototype developed in the MetaCarta OCTO.

Amateur Radio

• I'm a ham radio operator with Amateur Extra class license, call sign N9WLY. My satellite station uses LEO Pack dual Yagis with a Yaesu G5500 Az/El rotor, which is a hoot to watch pointing around on the roof. My HF station is now up and running to explore skywave HF communications via the upper atmosphere.

Amateur Astronomy

• Learning to use an Orion XX16g Dobsonian has been a blast for me and my daughters. We've seen craters on the moon, counted moons of Jupiter, and even discerned the Cassini gap on a particularly clear night in Nova Scotia. The XX16g let's us see a faint blur of deep sky objects like the Whirlpool Galaxy, but it cannot hold a camera. We're building a pedastal for a better scope, so hopefully soon we can start learning to stack images like the incredible pictures of Olly Penrice.
• If you love the night sky, then consider joining the International Darksky Association. Our skies are under threat from megaconstelations that damage astronomy and may open holes in the ozone layer. Starlink has not yet implemented Elon Musk's promises to reduce light pollution from Starlink satellites, and their planned deorbiting will introduce 2 tonnes of aluminum into the upper atmosphere per day, 4x more than natural meteors..
• Sky observing predictions.