“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”

― Carl Sagan

“The real problem is what can man and machine do together and not in competition.”

― Richard Hamming

I am a builder, an optimist, and a father. I currently serve as the Director of Applied Science at Actual.

WORK EXPERIENCE

Director of Applied Science → Actual, 2022–Now
Head of Simulation → Acubed by Airbus, 2020–2022
Staff Software Engineer → Acubed by Airbus, 2017–2020

EDUCATION

Stanford → M.S. Aero/Astro + Computer Science, 2017
UC Berkeley → B.S. Physics + Math, 2013

Principles

Hands on, technical leader, living at the frontier of software and science. Building software that enables human dreams.

My Work

  • I direct the Applied Science efforts at Actual. While this role is wide in breadth my two primary areas of focus are in (1) delivering modeling software to our brilliant customers that help them transform their organizations and (2) scaling our platform to meet the needs of an incredibly wide set of use cases. My day to day includes everything from writing code to leading an incredibly smart group of engineers and scientists to training our customers in our software. At one point or another I have worn the hats of every role you would expect to find at an enterprise SaaS startup other than outbound sales.

  • I led the airspace digital twin product at Acubed, taking it from a research idea that was used to publish academic papers to an enterprise product used by 100s of scientists, engineers, and regulators around the world. The product continues to grow in adoption, and is used to evaluate and shape future aviation technology and policy. Along the way, I published a number of academic papers (some of which were privileged recipients of best paper awards), led a dozen engineers working across the globe to productize this complex software, and scaled both the technology and adoption of this innovative product.

    You read more about the airspace digital twin and my time at Airbus from the Acubed blogs - more about me and more about the airspace digital twin.

  • I built out the infrastructure and deep learning models for drug discovery. I was the founding engineer for about 9 month, and set the engineering processes and structure in place along with the built out of the MVP for the company. The year was 2017, right before Attention is All You Need was published. I ended up using GANs for this work, with moderate success. My work helped get incubated and raise a Series A.

  • I spent three years at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory working with Mykel Kochenderfer on deep reinforcement learning, probabilistic decision making, and multi-agent systems. I am technically on leave from my Ph.D. program - perhaps I’ll return someday.

    I look back on my time at Stanford fondly - amongst the highlights were the collaborations with lab-mates and mentorship of undergraduate students; best paper awards; starting the first multi-purpose open-source framework for partially observable Markov Decision Processes in Julia; and of course ultimate frisbee.

    I miss the creative melting pot of bright minds and the constant push to further human knowledge.

Projects

in the Open

  • I’m starting a new project focused on AI and energy. More to come soon!

  • I work with Unicef on a connectivity project called Giga with an incredibly ambitious mission - to connect every student in the world to the internet by 2030. We have open sourced some of our work, check it out here.

  • I led a number of projects focused on deep reinforcement learning at Stanford. My paper on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning with Jayesh Gupta won a best paper award at a conference called AAMAS. You can still find the dated but still functional code for that work here. I am also