About Me
About Me
I have built and led teams at Facebook/Meta and at numerous startups, and have worked hands-on as a Principal Engineer in product, front-end, infra and integrity. I enjoy bringing together and inspiring a great team to solve cutting-edge, complex challenges across technology, product, business and regulatory spaces. Recruiting, mentoring and learning from world-class talent is especially important to me.
At Meta, I worked as the principal engineer across a 200-engineer organaization dedicated to automatically detecting and stopping abusive content and people at global scale, using computer vision, LLMs, and other types of ML models. Before that, I worked on several of the efforts that are now part of the Metaverse, started and led a team that shipped augmented-reality and deep learning neural network effects into the Facebook, Messenger and Instagram apps, and built out AR back-end infra support for persistent 3D spaces.
I wrote the Android app for Dropbox (now over a billion users), and led development of the Android version of Smule’s Magic Piano app (over 10 million users). I have worked with a number of early Internet startups, including Dropbox, Smule, Humin (acquired by Tinder), InterVU (acquired by Akamai) and Impulse! (acquired by Yahoo!). While at First Virtual Holdings (acquired by DoubleClick/Google), I developed the first Java-based interactive advertising banners.
I am the author of twelve patents on ML, Internet, digital entertainment, and telecommunications applications, and have published research in collaborative environments, object models, user interfaces, and hypertext. I was a member of the VRML Architecture Group, which developed the VRML 2.0 standard (included as part of MPEG-4), and I helped to found the VRML Consortium. I have worked on VR-based scientific visualization systems for NASA and was the technical director of the first feature-length film on the Internet.
I have a Master’s degree in Computer Science (advised by Andries van Dam), with a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Culture and Media, both from Brown University, and also studied traditional animation at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Specialties: Large scalable systems, forgery and abuse detection, data at scale, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, Android, iOS, computer vision, deep learning, speech recognition, software architecture, user interfaces, 3D graphics.
I enjoy foreign languages, and especially working my way through bilingual editions of texts, which makes a text possible to read in the original without having to constantly look up all the words and grammar, or balance multiple books on your lap. Poetry translation is almost impossible, but this way you can catch the meaning and the sound of the words. Languages I’ve done this with include Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Old English, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Tibetan, and Tamil. (Though the only language I can reliably read on that list without constantly consulting a dictionary is French.)
I also enjoy playing guitar & ukulele, juggling with a flower/devil stick, hiking, cooking, and foraging wild edibles. In 2019, I completed the Ironman 70.3 in Kona, I did the Hackney Half Marathon in 2022, and also in 2022, I competed in the Bodystrong Cornwall Regional Weighted Calisthenics Championship. I am a Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga Teacher, and recently completed a course in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.