W. Ben Towne Email & Phone Number

United States

Advising on entrepreneurship, strategy, and technology.Smartblocks tokenizes [especially commercial] real estate, legally, allowing for partial ownership in an asset class where the status quo practically requires overconcentration. It has only been a matter of time before a company figured out the legal aspects and did the technical work to build this inevitable future with huge market potential. I have wanted to see this in practice for years, have seen the readiness of the technical landscape through blockchain technology, and now, it's here!Limited investment opportunities (in the rocket-ship platform itself) are available; please reach out if you'd like an introduction.

Advising on entrepreneurship, strategy, and technology.Fleetmetrica reduces the risk of accidents involving trucks and improves sustainability aspects of truck transportation.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Our mission is “providing public benefit through usable technology interfaces, easing access to information and services available through government agencies and for-profit and other nonprofit non-governmental organizations, with a special focus on underserved communities” to be accomplished by “designing, implementing, and facilitating the use of, and access to, technology in various aspects and potentially through the provision of various services.” We formed out of winning a January 2021 Civic Hackathon with a solution to simplify scheduling of appointments in mass vaccination drives during the supply-constrained portion of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, so that especially the most vulnerable groups in our population wouldn't have to spend hours a day in user-unfriendly systems trying to find appointments, only to give up or be left standing in line outside for many hours on the coldest days of the year. After that original challenge was better solved with an abundance of vaccines and the rollout of vaccines.gov, we entered a period of dormancy but reactivated in 2024 with a new project called MedHound, a Crowdsourcing Community to Diminish Drug Dialing. It's a more general solution to the problem of having to waste so much time calling around to various pharmacies for hard-to-find medications. A live "ugly prototype" demo is up at demo.medhound.org! I built it 0-1 with Next.JS, React, Material UI, Tailwind CSS, and Google Cloud.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

In this role, I served as a consultant on advanced technologies, especially blockchain. I became a Certified Ethereum Professional and even before completing the certification consulted and advised on strategy as well as implementation. I served as an intrapreneur and full-stack web3 developer for client and internally incubated projects, which were consistently recognized with prize money in external competitions. Some projects required setting up and using SQL, NoSQL, and graph-based data stores as well as React for front-end components, Node.js, Next.js, & Express servers locally and/or using cloud hosting, primarily in AWS but with occasional use of Google and Azure/Microsoft cloud environments. I led small software development teams for client projects. I also advised on research, acquisition, and hiring efforts elsewhere in the company.

Warrendale, Pennsylvania, United States

As a contractor to a standard-setting professional society and affiliated consortia-building nonprofit, I helped large, distributed groups in the mobility engineering industry secure the aerospace supply chain and address safety & security challenges of autonomous & electrified ground mobility. I provided expertise on a variety of topics (especially blockchain), interfaced with related organizations such as MOBI and EEA and SAE International committees, presented introductions to blockchain technology in multiple countries, evaluated partnership proposals, and contributed to longer-term strategy & planning. I served as the chief architect and lead full-stack developer for the Aerospace Standards Part Qualification Program's blockchain-backed database of qualifications to manufacture certain performance-critical parts, helping secure the aerospace supply chain (see https://doi.org/10.4271/2019-01-1343 for details). I delivered consulting, advice, & some software development on topics related to electronic Authorized Release Certificates (airworthiness certificates), cargo tracking, Health-Ready Components & Systems, data exchange, open standards development, autonomous vehicle safety testing, electric vehicle public key infrastructure, knowledge graph & ontology building, wiki community development, "talent search" data analysis, recommender systems for navigability enhancement in a large digital library, sustainability initiatives, and much more. My service as a connector within and across organizations also produced valuable opportunities for SAE (now rebranding to Fullsight).

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

In this role, I designed and led experiments for the creation of new detailed knowledge about the ways that computers impact society (and vice versa), and the impacts of design decisions on platforms for large-scale collaboration. I did full-stack implementation for several projects aiding in data collection and analysis and authored or co-authored several peer-reviewed scientific publications in high-quality venues, with highlights listed at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bentowne/details/publications/. Following graduation, I continued working for the university as a staff programmer especially under the Deliberative Democracy program lead, for example making open-source contributions to the GovTrack system for tracking perspectives on US federal legislation that could be used in additional research.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

In this role, I helped build technology platforms to connect & enable leading social entrepreneurs. Providing technology support at the highest levels of the organization also exposed me to valuable perspectives and learning opportunities about finding high-leverage points where small changes can yield large societal benefits, in financially sustainable solutions that allow those impacts to grow even further.

Westchester County, Ny

I worked on research projects in the Governance Science research group, including some technical challenges associated with setting up a pipeline for analyzing large data sets through graph database analysis.

Group 65 (Advanced Networks and Applications) specializes in high-performance airborne heterogeneous networking, exploring sensor and decision-support systems.In this role, I investigated virtualization solutions for a scalable network emulation testbed. This work allows the Group to emulate very large networks to test new protocols (etc.), with a more reasonably sized set of hardware.

2006-9: Tutor: Physics, Calculus, Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering: Communications.2005-8: Computing Services department: User services (tech support), new deployments/upgrades, website work, & media digitization.2007: Technology & Community Development research.2008: Economic Empowerment & Global Learning Project (EEGLP) New Orleans, lead researcher for "Technology and Society."2008-9: Honors thesis, implementing cellular automata in reprogrammable logic.Jan. 2009: Alternative Energy feasibility/applications research.

Phd, Societal Computing

As summarized at sc.cs.cmu.edu: “Our PhD program in the integrated, innovative discipline of Societal Computing provides the techniques.

Master Of Science (Ms), Computation, Organizations, & Society

Bs With Honors, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Activities and Societies: Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, Environmental Sustainability Committees, Christian Fellowship groups, Arts Society.

Ba / Summa Cum Laude, Community Development

This is an interdisciplinary social sciences program blending components from sociology, psychology, economics, political/policy sciences.

Certificate Of Graduation, Civic Operations