The Technically Optimistic podcast examines the intersection of technology with our society. We started with "Season One" examining how artificial intelligence technology rolls out and impacts us all -- and asks questions about power and humanity. Most conversations about AI are about "go full steam ahead" or "pause everything". This podcast lives in the grey, and believes that if more and more people understand the nuances, then we actually can be optimistic -- we can live in a future where we reap the rewards of technology, while mitigating the risks to our society. We had amazing guests like Justine Bateman, Maria Ressa, Senator Michael Bennet, Representative Jay Obernolte, Erik Brynjolfsson, and others."Season Two" responds to a thing we heard repeatedly - "you can't talk about AI without talking about data." We tackle hard questions like the consequences of data in reproductive rights, the power and danger of data in criminal justice, the future of social media, and other topics. We featured amazing voices from Frances Haugen, to Meredith Whittaker, to Jonathan Zittrain, and others.The podcast has been featured on "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, in Variety, Rolling Stone, and was the #2 tech podcast on Apple Podcasts.Search for "Technically Optimistic" wherever you get your podcasts. And subscribe to the newsletter at technicallyoptimistic.substack.com.

TUMO is an amazing institution that offers free educational enrichment to teenagers. It is a place unlike any other in the world where students get access to technology in ways not normally available. The studios have computers, 3D printers, music studios, robotics labs, photography and filmography equipment, etc. Its goal is to expand the horizons of children. Anecdotal evidence shows that students that go through TUMO are better prepared for higher educational opportunities.As of 2019, TUMO Yerevan is completely self sustaining and services about 15,000 unique kids every week. TUMO is also expanding to a series of international locations, such as Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beirut, Tirana, Kyiv, and Los Angeles.

Medic is a nonprofit organization founded to improve health with and in the hardest-to-reach communities. The open-source software helps over 25,000 community health workers provide care for more than 14 million people in Africa and Asia. These health workers deliver care and services, door-to-door, through one million home visits each month. Together with our partners, we envision a more just world in which health workers are supported as they provide care for their neighbors, universal health coverage is a reality, and health is secured as a human right.

Acquired by Amplica Labs / Project Liberty and listed as one of the 5 best North American innovations of 2024 by Fast Company -- SpeakEasy AI, née Narwhal, is a social media network designed with the goal of helping democracy function better and for people to understand each other better.We built technology to sort conversations by quality; to disincentivize trolling; to introduce people to new ideas; to prevent ideological echo chambers. We figured out creative ways to use AI to bring new voices into thriving discussions.

Responsible for building the largest and highest performing technical team within Democratic politics as its first CTO (the role of CTO did not exist previously). Recruited, and lead, a 45+ person team to work on infrastructure, data / analytics, community support, and security. Raised millions earmarked to tech for the Democratic party. Spent time on tech strategy, as well as outwardly facing communications, and PR.This team was instrumental in revamping the Democrat’s data warehouse. All data, from democratic campaigns, are centralized in the DNC’s data warehouse. But, the data warehouse we inherited was a decade old, and suffering from neglect and mismanagement. The DNC Tech team created a new cloud-based warehouse, stabilized the incoming data pipelines, and re-organized data in an opinionated way. This new warehouse is what Presidential campaigns used in the 2020 cycle.The DNC Tech team was integral in taking back the House of Representatives, in managing to keep losses in the Senate to a minimum, as well as flipping 7 governors seats. The DNC Tech team improved its ability to process voter files from the Secretaries of State, and developed responsive processes to support state parties and campaigns. The team orchestrated a large-scale (100M+) purchase of cell phone numbers, negotiated a nationwide contract for a peer-to-peer texting platform, and created a feedback loop to improve its contractibility models. In addition, the team ran a data collection operation to provide polling place information to 2 million unique voters via websites and widgets. Finally, DNC Tech was directly responsible in executing a strategy to get the Democrats to be “secure by default”. In addition, I was part of the negotiation team that worked to reach an agreement with the state parties to participate in the Democratic Data Exchange — an organization that is set up to facilitate real-time swapping of information between campaigns, PACs, and outside organizations.

Responsible for the launch of the first ever self-driving Uber fleet in Pittsburgh, PA. Deployed a service where self-driving vehicles picked up and moved passengers as part of the Uber service. This fleet, at the time, had a perfect safety record.Overall director of the Uber ATC (Uber's self-driving efforts) from March 2016 until the acquisition of Otto, and then transitioned to the overall software lead across all Uber ATG sites. Built the team from 50 people to over 500 spanning hardware, software, test operations, and passenger operations all with the goal of making the transition from research to product development. Was deeply involved, and managed, software work in mapping, simulations, perception, planning, onboard infrastructure, cloud based compute and storage, and operational management.

In charge of the 500-person global team that managed Twitter Platform -- the core infrastructure that powers Twitter as well as the Twitter ecosystem. Managed the metrics of reliability, performance, scalability, and availability of Twitter worldwide, as well as the developer effectiveness of all engineers internal to Twitter.Previously, held multiple roles:Software Engineer / Individual Contributor - API / Platform Team. Worked on and maintained the Twitter API (in Ruby). Worked with external developers to understand requirements and integrated them to further the Platform. Designed, architected, and built the first iteration of Twitter's Geo Platform by introducing the ability to geo-tag Tweets. Built the prototype Rockdove, or Twitter's geo database (in Scala).Technical Lead - API / Platform Team. Acted as the arbiter for all of Twitter Engineering to expose back-end services through the Twitter API. In charge of the "style" of the Twitter API, and worked with business development to work very closely with external partners. Managed the conversion of the Twitter ecosystem from Basic Authentication to OAuth (and designed the OAuth Echo protocol for ecosystem identity verification).Technical Lead - Platform Services. Helped define a team that is in charge of Twitter's core logic. Set forth a new technical direction for the scalable delivery mechanisms of Twitter. Defined new quality metrics for the core logic. In charge of authentication mechanisms at Twitter. Implementing a data driven approach to designing and maintaining core infrastructure.Sr. Director - Platform Services. Ran the organisation that spearheaded the migration of Twitter from the Ruby stack to a JVM powered one. Worked with the rest of engineering to significantly raise the uptime of Twitter (aka slay the whale). And started creating new Platform functionality such as Twitter cards, and the Twitter 3rd party syndication mechanisms.

Responsibilities include product management, architecture, and engineering of a Scala-based scalable platform to measure, track, and share personal energy consumption. Helps push the national energy conversation to be one around holistic energy accounting rather than focusing on particular verticals. Built a read/write API, forums, aggregation/spidering facilities to tie into external web sites, “wiki-like” back end to store data/algorithms, and data widgets. Business Week named it the “Best idea of 2008”.Merged with Ennovationz in the Spring of 2010 to create a unified platform that is being used by organizations such as PBS in their television series "Earth, The Operator's Manual".

Founded, built, managed, and sold a successful and profitable ten person technological design and consulting firm. Responsibilities included new business development, marketing, and communications. On the engineering side, aided with requirements gathering, architecting, and implementation. Select projects include: developing a large (10,000+ unit) install base of mobile computers with a back-end infrastructure to schedule and play media while also controlling and transmitting telemetry; managing innovation on safety platforms for crane operators and hospital security mechanisms; and authoring and deploying a back-end crawler for a developer targeted repository for “the best” open source components.

Created a spring term class entitled “Every Bit You Make” for students to do research on 21st century surveillance techniques; learn and understand the infrastructure of IP networks, RF networks, RFID devices, and the basics of data mining. Created a fall term class entitled “Physical computing without the computer” where students researched and developed mechanical computing devices.

Taught fabrication at many different scales -- from the millimeter to the many meter. Every week, had crash courses in microcontroller programming, laser cutting, 3D printing, computer network, etc.

Worked as a research assistant to Professor Neil Gershenfeld studing organic networks of extreme scales. Designed a set of rules and a set of characteristics that comprise the "Internet 0" (as published in Scientific American under "The Internet of Things") -- how to extend the reach of the Internet from computing to the physical world, and how to extend the end-to-end notions of the Internet down to the modulation schemes and beyond the protocols.

TiVo Hacks covers tips for changing the order of recorded programs, activating the 30-second skip to blaze through commercials, and more, by using magical remote-control codes. Once you take the lid off, you will learn how to gain even more fun and functionality. You can upgrade the hard drive for more hours of recording, log in to the serial port for command-line access to programming data, log files, closed-captioning data, display graphics on the TiVo screen, and even play MP3s.

Designed and implemented the Popular Power distributed computational engine. Created a Java-based secure execution environment that ran on thousands of nodes; built an API for mobile code execution with security mechanisms, statistics gathering, halting, and resuming capabilities.