Research scientist, inventor, analyst, software architect, interface designer, former cyborg, finder of winds.
I like to work on open-ended problems, the kind where the solution isn't at all obvious and even the problem isn't well understood. Over the course of my carreer I've worked on everything from novel user interfaces to peer-to-peer ad-hoc networks to intelligence augmentation and wearable computing. Most recently I was at Project Loon, a Google skunk-works project to bring wireless internet to rural areas via high-altitude balloons, where I was a founding member of the Planning, Simulation and Control group. Some highlights include desiging and building our first mission control system, desiging algorithms to control a fleet of autonomous balloons, and working on a machine learning system for automatic station-keeping. After almost ten years Loon finally landed its last balloon in May 2021, and my final project was to package up and publish telemetry and sensor data from over 218 flight-years of stratospheric flight data for use by atmospheric scientists anywhere.