I'm currently working at Sense, and having a lot of fun building the next generation of smart electric meters.
From 2007 to 2013 I worked for One Laptop per Child. I helped get the XO-1 laptop into production, then developed the next three laptops: XO-1.5, XO-1.75 (ARM), and XO-4 (touch enabled). I had the pleasure of leading the electrical design, as well as working with Fuse Project, Gecko Design, and Quanta R&D on the mechanical design. A tablet (XO-3) was also designed and pre-production prototypes built. As the XO-1 entered production, I had the opportunity to provide some field support for deployments.
My first task at OLPC was architecting and building the school server. In order to maximize the potential of the OLPC XO laptop, its applications are designed for operation stand-alone or with a group of other laptops. The school server operates as a resource-rich peer to the laptop as well as providing centralized network functions (internet caching, XMPP server, DHCP, DNS).
While the "personal computer" has had a great impact in our lives, I believe that an even greater change will be brought by services embedded in the the home (the home server, or gateway). A home server provides computation and storage resources for services local to the home. Think of it as a hot water heater. You don't need to know where it is, you don't need to do anything to it (other than replace it every fifteen years or so), you just expect hot water to come out of the right faucet. Similarly, the home server can run applications within the home, which input and output through network connected sensors and displays.
From 2002 to 2007 I worked for France Telecom R&D (now rebranded as Orange Innovation), in their Boston (Cambridge) laboratory (now closed) for four years, looking for new services within the home. I also participated in the Communications Futures Program at MIT and Cambridge Univ., particulary in the Broadband Working Group.
From June 2000 through September 2002, I worked at a small startup, Ucentric Systems, located in scenic Maynard, Mass, doing hardware development and system architecture. Ucentric was developing a new consumer device, the Home Server, but ended up concentrating on media delivery within the home. Ucentric was bought by Motorola in 2003.
I'm on leave of absence from my doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab, with Dr. V. Michael Bove, Jr. I have been associated with the lab since I was an undergraduate (Class of '87), building a variety of image processing systems, and structured video projects using them. Six of those years were spent as staff, designing, building, and playing with, a scalable image processing system, Cheops.
One of my primary interests is computer architecture - how to design machines to efficiently perform a given set of tasks. The tasks I am interested in performing are the acquisition, manipulation, and presentation of sensory information. Motion image information in particular, although audio and text/still images also interest me.
A strong second interest is structured video (also commonly called object based video.) These are motion images which are composed at the receiver from descriptions of the objects in the scene and a controlling script, and were the subject of an very early thesis of mine: Synthetic Movies.
After growing up in Tennessee and Peru, I've spent the last three decades living in and around Boston. I married my wife, Santina, in '94, and we are the proud parents of two boys, Ian and Nathan.
In my spare time, I help take care of Acton's wonderful conservation lands, as a member of the Land Stewards Committee. While we work wherever needed, I tend to spend time working on Wetherbee Land and Great Hill.
We started growing vegetables in the community garden in 2014. It gets much more sun there than anywhere near our house!
My mom and dad's hobby was recording the Watlington and Hammond family genealogy. Two books contain a large part of their work: Watlingtons of West Tennessee and Our Hammond and Hale Ancestors. I also collected a cookbook of my Mom's recipes (and I keep my recipes online).
Solid State Dump, a short-lived art installation
A while back when I had the time to build hardware just for fun, I had the chance to enable some of Karl Sims' early visions: an Interactive Video Kaleidascope and Genetic Images