About

Early childhood
As a young child, I was inspired by the movie, Short-Circuit, where Johnny Five reconfigures his circuitboard and operates on artificial intelligence. I started programming at an early age on multi-player text-based adventures (MUDs) trying to create monsters with artificial intelligence.

Schooling
Inspired by my childhood and love for programming, I developed interests in psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and education. I studied the process of learning, human and brain development, machine learning techniques, and theoretical computer science algorithms. Combining everything, I became interested in “intelligent thinking” mobile robotic systems. Loving too many subjects and taking extra courses in artificial intelligence and machine learning, I finished UC Berkeley with 234 units (120 were required to graduate) and received my Bachelors of Science in Psychology as well as in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (with an honors emphasis in Cognitive Science). During that time, I TA’d for three classes over five semesters, most notably for Artificial Intelligence (CS 188).

Afterwards, I went on to Carnegie Mellon University for a Master in Robotics, where I focused on online and real-time machine learning algorithms. I worked on a robot that traveled underground in Africa with a semi-autonomous tele-operational control. I was also a GSI for the Web Application Development course, helping grad students build web products. Though I finished the required courses, I decided to forego my thesis in order to join a startup back in Silicon Valley.

Working for The Man

In high school, I worked on over a dozen website applications and e-commerce websites, since that was my idea of “fun”. I also pioneered an open-source project in high school for robotics allowing people to program a PIC microprocessor in Linux by reverse engineering a Windows protocol. The first summer in college, I worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a hardware computer vision algorithm for the Mars Rover’s 3D reconstruction.

The following summers, I worked at the Microsoft Headquarters. As part of the Mobile Devices team, I added multi-core support for x86 processors to Windows Embedded. At the Advertising Laboratories, I discovered and tested new ways to advertise and came up with a prototype that learned user preferences from search queries (to serve moer relevant advertisements). At the Bing Search Labs, I created new classifiers for Event Search.

Afterwards, I worked at a start-up called Permuto, where I scaled an advertising system with over 200 million unique users and devised clever ways to create unobtrusive, useful advertisements.

Entreprenuership
As early as junior high, I developed an advertising business on affiliate advertising through my online games (MUDs) which generated over 100,000 leads through a service called AllAdvantage.com. When AllAdvantage.com went bankrupt, my affiliate business went down the drain, although it was a good, first entrepreneurial experience, considering that I made enough to pay for the majority of my college education.

In 2005, I started a two-year project to build and manufacture kiosks with three of my friends. We built a Linux-based operating system, which allowed for client-restricted access to a web browser in “kiosk-mode” (for large business owners to have a local “Google” for their product inventory). We manufactured a kiosk out of aluminum, but we didn’t have the infrastructure to launch the product to the desired scale, so we disbanded the idea.

Late 2006, I co-founded HotSwap, Inc. and delivered the first ever video e-commerce platform. We developed an accelerated video-uploading technology and a phoneme-level analysis for audio content to search through videos. In 2007, HotSwap received acclaimed praise from Techcrunch, Reuters, G4TV, and Business 2.0. Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, was one of our advisors (who also starred in our commercial). For many reasons, I ultimately resigned and the team disbanded. However, this was an invaluable experience where I learned a tremendous amount about building a successful company.

In 2009, I launched an iPhone application with a friend, which received over three million downloads (46,000 reviews) and generated significant revenue through advertising. In 2010, I launched another iPhone application called Word Seek HD that made it to the top 40 iPad games list in the App Store and was featured in ‘Educational Games’, ‘Word Battle Games’ and ‘Online Multiplayer.’ It consistently ranks as the #4 Word Game just behind Words With Friends, Scrabble, and Boggle.

In late 2010, I left my job and started my own company, which is currently developing educational mobile gaming for kids. Stay tuned…