Meet the deeda Team

The deeda Team

Atif K Khan

Atif is the CEO and Founder of deeda Inc. His vision of a unified ecosystem for web, desktop and devices began with his graduate work in Neuroscience at Harvard University. Atif's research focused on "Proustian Memories" - the kind of memory, where an unexpected re-encounter with a scent from the distant past brings back a rush of memories. How does the brain create and maintain such complex links between such seemingly separated senses? More important, why don't we use this type of contextual interlinking between data and content in the real world? We keep our pictures in our picture folder, documents in a document folder - on the web we similarly isolate visual, auditory and text based content in separate sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, etc. There must be a better way to organize, link and recall such diversely related content.

The word deeda originates from “Dynamic End-to-End Data Aggregation”, the contextual mapping and data linking technology developed by Atif to bring Proustian Memories to the web, desktop and wireless device environment. Today, deeda Inc. is the corporate face for our set of Open Platform products: deeda.com, deeda Desktop, and deeda Mobile.

As the 2005 developer of his own set of capacitive-touch devices with wireless device-to-device capabilities, Atif has consistently remained ahead of this rapidly developing area in technology. Many aspects of his independent design and development work can be seen in technology that was eventually validated through Microsoft’s Zune, and Apple’s iPod Touch and iPhone. His work in developing wireless capacitive-touch devices and systems began in 2004 and has been acknowledged by the Boston Globe as well as through patents filed in this field. These include application 60/668,650, filed: 04/05/2005, as well as applications 60/881,815, and 60/881,808, Filed: 01/19/2007. These patents also cover Atif's contextual mapping and data visualization models for dynamically sharing and retrieving content across a web, desktop and device ecosystem.

Atif’s early vision for building wireless devices and web systems on an open-platform Linux based OS, along with an easily accessible open-development platform, have been further endorsed through strategies recently adopted by such industry stalwarts as Google and Facebook. Atif plays a principal role in all aspects of deeda’s web, desktop and device designs, as well as actively designs and develops all of the applications that run across the deeda ecosystem. As the principal architect of the deeda system he is also responsible for maintaining deeda’s intellectual property. Accordingly, his roles and functions at deeda Inc. are extremely diverse. When not managing and developing deeda's suite of products, Atif loves working on his second passion - Classic Muscle Cars.

Original SolidWorks renderings - 2005:

Dylan Schiemann

Co-Founder Dojo/ CEO Sitepen – As CEO of SitePen and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit, Dylan is best known for building Web applications that make use of JavaScript/AJAX, Dojo, Comet and other Web development technologies. He has helped develop Web apps for companies including Renkoo, Informatica, Security FrameWorks, and Vizional Technologies. Dylan has been our friend and advisor from a very early stage. From advice on web hosting solutions to ‘big picture’ development strategies as well as inviting us to various Valley networking events, Dylan has been an extremely valuable asset to deeda Inc. Today Dylan and his team at Sitepen are working to help complete our products and realize our vision. deeda Inc. is also a client of SitePen.

John M. Hann

John is deeda's Director of Engineering and is a Web 2.0 developer and evangelist, pioneering DHTML and Ajax techniques while leveraging Open Source tools and languages to deliver world-class products that are impressive yet usable, rich yet responsive. During his career as a programmer, team leader, and CTO, Mr. Hann has successfully delivered more than 65 enterprise-class, web-based Internet or intranet applications. Notable projects include a Web 2.0-class product created in 2000 (US Patent 7,016,751) and several Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) as far back as 1996 (using browser plug-ins before 1999 and hidden IFRAMEs until 2004). Mr. Hann graduated cum laude with a Bachelor's of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts.

Chris Ash

Restless and always with an eye towards a challenge, Chris is usually found doing what he always has ... going in several directions at once. Having been involved with developing Rich Internet Applications since 1996, he has spent time as a consultant, developer and inventor. A long time proponent of what later be known as Web 2.0 and "Cloud Computing", he has helped develop web applications and solutions for many of the Fortune 500 financial and telecommunication companies. Chris Ash is deeda's Lead Developer responsible for understanding and developing solutions for the data flow between deeda and various third-party APIs. As with everything Chris has done in the past, he is also capable of working with every aspect of our development needs.

Andy Liu

Director of Android Development.

Andy comes to us after a stellar career at Motorola where he first started working with the Android platform. Today he's successfully completed our first Android Contact Sync application which merges your friend's Facebook pictures into your Android Contact List. Always focused on emerging Android development Andy is the cornerstone of the Mobile component of our three part ecosystem.

Brian Barrick

Senior Web Applications Developer

Brian comes to us after putting in his dues at FileMaker. While there, Brian was the main architect and project manager for Bento. If you check it out you'll see why his past work and our future vision make for the perfect marriage. Brian is currently busy developing our web application that will neatly tie our desktop and mobile ecosystem together.

Chuck Boggs

Chuck is deeda's Director of Corporate Development. Previously, as Vice President of NovaLink USA, he sold, designed and managed the development of more than 60 Website projects for clients; American Express Travel Services, Harvard’s Deaconess Medical Center, Digital Equipment Corporation and Silicon Valley Bank.


Representation:

Advisory Roles

Dr Mark Granovetter (Stanford University)

Mark Granovetter is an American sociologist who has created some of the most influential theories in modern sociology since the 1970s. He is best known for his work in social network theory and in economic sociology, particularly his theory on the spread of information in social networks known as "The Strength of Weak Ties" (1973). Dr Granovetter is working with deeda to help us develop models for analyzing our aggregated social web data. Our goal is to help empower our users by offering a deeper understanding of their social graph information, strong and weak-tie social influences, and something we've coined, "Personal Analytics".

The strength of weak ties

Dr Granovetter's most famous work, "The Strength of Weak Ties", is considered to be one of the most influential sociology papers ever written.

In marketing or politics, the weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties. The concepts of this work were later published in the related monograph "Getting A Job", an adaptation of Granovetter's doctoral dissertation at Harvard University's Department of Social Relations, with the title: "Changing Jobs: Channels of Mobility Information in a Suburban Population".

Economic sociology: embeddedness

In the field of economic sociology, Mark Granovetter has been a leader ever since the publication in 1985 of an article that launched "new economic sociology", "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness". This article caused Granovetter to be identified with the concept of "embeddedness", the idea that economic relations between individuals or firms are embedded in actual social networks and do not exist in an abstract idealized market (a concept originally described in Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation). He is currently working on a book provisionally called Society and Economy.

"Tipping points" / threshold models

Dr Granovetter has also done research on a model of how fads are created. Consider a hypothetical mob assuming that each person's decision whether to riot or not is dependent on what everyone else is doing. Instigators will begin rioting even if no one else is, while others need to see a critical number of trouble makers before they riot, too. This threshold is assumed to be distributed to some probability distribution. The outcomes may diverge largely although the initial condition of threshold may only differ very slightly. This threshold model of social behavior was proposed previously by Thomas Schelling and later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point.

Security influence

Dr Granovetter's work has influenced some researchers working in the field of capability-based security. Interactions in these systems can be described using "Granovetter diagrams", which illustrate changes in the ties between objects.

Nouchine Hadjikhani MD

Associate Professor in Radiology, Harvard Medical School
Assistant in Radiology, Mass General Hospital
Affiliated Faculty, Harvard-MIT-HST
Professeur Boursier, EPFL

During her post-doctoral work in Sweden, Nouchine Hadjikhani used positron emission tomography to scan the visual cortex of the brain. It was the first time she got to peek into someone’s head. “I was trying to understand how vision and touch are connected,” she says. “When you put your hand in your pocket and you feel your key, you know which one it is even though you don’t see it. The question was, how can you visualize what you feel with your hand?”

In 1995, she had her first encounter with MRI. “That was quite something,” she says. “I was in the magnet myself and they showed me an image of my own brain. It was a very impressive moment. Suddenly you can have somebody alive and look at different things in the brain. There’s no danger and you can repeatedly get data about how the brain is organized.”

Today, Hadjikhani also studies the brain’s perception of facial and body expressions. What part of the brain recognizes fear, aggravation or anger in someone’s stance? Hadjikhani and Dr. Beatrice de Gelder, a colleague at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, are trying to find out.

“There are more people looking at faces now and the amount of literature is amazing,” says Hadjikhani. “But you don’t normally see a face alone, you see whole bodies.”

Today, Nouchine and Atif are hard at work developing the contextual mapping, linking and retrieval abilities of deeda to mimic what our minds do on a daily basis. Nouchine is working to ensure that deeda will benefit both medical research as well as human interactions across the web, desktop and devices.


Joshua Schachter - Joshua released the first version of Delicious (then called del.icio.us) in September 2003. The service coined the term social bookmarking and featured tagging, a system he'd invented for organizing links suggested to Memepool and publishing some of them on his personal linkblog, Muxway. On March 29, 2005, Schachter announced he would work full-time on Delicious. On December 9, 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious for an undisclosed sum. Prior to working full-time on Delicious, Schachter was an analyst in Morgan Stanley's Equity Trading Lab. He created geoURL in 2002 and ran it until 2004. Shortly after leaving Yahoo! this year Joshua met with Atif to provide some advice and guidance to deeda Inc.

Casey Hill - Casey joined the deeda Team in May 2007. After receiving his engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Casey joined Motorola in 1985 as a sales engineer in Atlanta, Georgia. He has held technical and management positions with Motorola in engineering, research, marketing, standards and product development. Casey has contributed to a broad range of Motorola business units in Georgia, Florida, Texas and Illinois, and he has led several start up ventures within Motorola, including a location based services business and a cellular handset applications business. He is currently Senior Director of IPR Strategy and Corporate Licensing in Motorola’s law department in Schaumburg, IL. Casey is a published author in technical journals and publications, and is the charter chair of the IEEE Atlanta Vehicular Technology society. He, as a representative of Motorola, earned the Licensing Executive Society Deal of the Year Award in 2005. He was a member of the Motorola Science Advisory Board, is an elected Dan Noble Fellow, Motorola’s highest technical honor, and currently holds 37 US patents.

Casey moved on to Research in Motion earlier this year and is now their new Vice President of Intellectual Property Strategy.

Casey’s roles at deeda Inc. include guiding corporate strategy. He champions a strong vision of future location based services through the deeda ecosystem and also provides us with significant experience from his time at Motorola, and now at RIM, in building and deploying such strategies.

Jim O'Connor – MVC Capital – Mr. O'Connor is a senior investment professional with over a decade of private equity and venture capital experience. Prior to joining TTG Advisers, Mr. O'Connor held senior management positions within Motorola, Inc. (NYSE:MOT). Jim was Managing Director and Co-Founder of Motorola Ventures the venture capital investment arm for Motorola, where he led numerous global transactions. In his most recent role, Jim led Motorola's Technology Acceleration Program where he worked closely with a global team of technologists, to prioritize technology programs, create value from intellectual property, and guide creative research from innovation through early-stage commercialization. In 2006, Jim was named to the American Ventures Magazine (AVM) "40 UNDER 40" list. Before Motorola, he worked for A.T. Kearney as a management consultant and the U.S. Treasury Department in the areas of Domestic and International Finance as a White House Fellow. Additionally, he held roles at Ariel Capital Management and Sidley & Austin. He is Co-Chair of the Chicago Entrepreneurial Center (CEC) and a Board member of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, the Chicago Urban League, the Big Shoulders Fund for the Archdiocese of Chicago's inner-city school fund and serves as a Trustee on the Board of the Field Museum of National History. He holds a BA (Government) and JD from Georgetown University and an MBA from the Northwestern University J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Jim is actively involved in helping deeda advance its funding and management goals.