Ben Howard Email & Phone Number

Portland, Or, Us

Vancouver, Washington, Us

KinectAir is a massively unique company that needs the trust in aviation multiplied by the move fast and break things attitude of Silicon Valley. Our founding CEO embodied that in a single person and now that it is time to pass the baton, Katie Buss and I will be leading the company as Co-CEOs to fill that role in abundance.

Vancouver, Washington, Us

KinectAir is working to make flying private as easy as your favorite ride hailing app. I am currently building the product organization that will reimagine air travel in tandem with the technology organization that will implement it. My goal is to give product management a vision and the freedom to achieve it in concert with engineering iterations. I joined KinectAir to introduce air mobility to a new aspirational demographic by removing current barriers through the use of software technology. To democratize on-demand flight, the industry needs firm, upfront pricing and instant, in your hand booking. KinectAir will start by using a mobile-first strategy to meet customers where ever they are and provide frictionless access to open-ended travel with aviation standard safety. Then, to run a profitable company while providing this service at an economical price, KinectAir will be backed by AI-powered dispatch. Deep Learning and Monte Carlo modeling will allow KinectAir's AI to optimize routing, gracefully handle itinerary changes, and provide customers with instant prices. The efficient, timely operational decisions of KinectAir's AI will allow us to offer prices significantly below the current market rate by using machine learning to dynamically adjust prices that fill or shorten empty legs, fly off-peak hours and reduce scheduling overhead. Better software can make an entire industry more economic, environmental and accessible.

New York, Ny, Us

I work with clients interested in precision agriculture, cloud compute, drones and other technology by giving them an industry perspective that can quickly help them make decisions. Many clients are investors looking for the next big thing while others are manufactures who want research next generation products.-Understanding investor, entrepreneur, founder, executive and engineering management team goals to provide expert advice-Drone use cases, industry capability, technology ecosystem including hardware and software-Expertise on cloud compute trends, product offerings, market competition and best practices-Machine learning / AI application guidance to assist teams in applying solutions effectively -CPU and GPU hardware and software roadmaps

Business Impact-Captured new strategic investors by encouraging team to invest in IOT devices for realtime image processing -Enabled $14M Series C Up round by presenting engineering team strengths and vision to board / investors -Increased platform capacity by 26x with a strategic focus on scalable cloud architectureLeadership-Pioneered Machine Vision, Big Data Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence techniques by adding accomplished team members-Improved team morale by driving product management to create clear, achievable, high impact requirements-Increased team skill set by providing access to industry conferences and workshops-Reduced deployment time to minutes through investment in Continuous Integration / Deployment technologies-Standardized company written communication with a single source of record for documentation and project tracking-Built 4 teams Software, Robotics, Data Science, contractors across multiple geographies and time zones-Provided a steady voice to balance technical and business objectives

Wilsonville, Or, Us

Business Impact-Secured first funding by pitching UAV hardware and image processing software prototypes to investors-Passed million dollar revenue mark with products developed-Expanded production capacity 5x by hiring mechanical engineering team to design for lean manufacturing-Created recurring SaaS customers by processing more than 1 Million acres of data in 60+ countries-Increased daily customer usage 4x in one year by adding high impact analysis features-Accelerated data handling performance 15x on 200 Terabyte datasets -Partnered with John Deere Operations Center for first operational drone data tool in precision farmingLeadership-Created product requirements through collaboration with sales, support and enterprise customers-Hired Director of Software Engineering and Senior Software Engineers to extend technical capability and execute product vision-Hit business development goals while responding to customers by establishing an agile software development lifecycle-Expanded data value by creating a RESTful API for analytics, partnerships and data management-Worked with all team members to create an enjoyable, productive work environment with diverse staff

Santa Clara, California, Us

I worked in VPG and communicated with other teams to get access to the latest CPU hardware and driver builds. I designed and implemented a benchmark application that tested different parts of the CPU and the Intel integrated GPU against an Nvidia graphics card using C and OpenCL. High load algorithms were run on different compute architectures ranging from GPU's to Xeons and all the way down to the Atom family. The benchmark was designed with a framework that future tests could easily be dropped into. The benchmark was handed off to another team who is still using it for development. The tests would scale from 1-N threads on the CPU as well as the GPU's so that the cost and benefits of multithreading could be graphed and issues like poor memory access strategies could be optimized out. I also developed algorithms foundational to augmented reality, Advanced Driver Safety and self driving car projects.

Sherwood, Oregon, Us

I assembled new John Deere, Cub Cadet, STIHL and other equipment before delivering it to customers. After deliver I also provided operation and safety recommendations to help customers with their new equipment.

I worked with with troubled youth enrolled int a residential treatment facility. My job was to provide kids with life skills to help them transition into successful adults.

Klamath Falls, Oregon, Us

I delivered prescriptions and equipment from the pharmacy to patient rooms and nurse stations.

Bachelor Of Science (Bs), Computer Software Engineering

Education record