Former Vulcan Position Description
From July 2007 to March 2013, I was full time at Vulcan Inc., the parent company that oversees business investments and philanthropy for Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen.
In my position as Senior Research Program Manager, Knowledge Systems, I led the creation and management of a new advanced research program on semantic technology and artificial intelligence. This Halo Advanced Research (HalAR) program complemented and expanded the scope of the previously existing Project Halo, focusing on deeper underlying technologies, new domains, and longer horizons. A major part of this work was creating and leading Vulcan’s SILK system for advanced semantic rule-based knowledge representation and reasoning. I also led related aspects of research work on the two other main systems in Project Halo: AURA and SMW+.
The research was conducted within Vulcan’s Technology R&D division, notable for having developed SpaceShipOne, the first privately owned, manned rocket to attain suborbital space, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004. I worked very closely with both Mark Greaves who led the overall Project Halo, and Dave Gunning who was another senior program manager in Project Halo. (Mark was formerly a researcher at Boeing and then a program manager at DARPA, focusing on semantic web and intelligent agents. Dave was formerly also a program manager at DARPA, focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning.)
I continued my consulting practice part-time while employed full-time at Vulcan, as part of my arrangement with Vulcan.