Othar Hansson: Curriculum Vitae

Othar Hansson is a managing director of Thinkbank, Inc. Prior to co-founding Thinkbank, Othar was VP Research at Heuristicrats Research, Inc.

From 1999 to 2001, Othar was also managing director and Principal Developer at WR Hambrecht + Co, LLC, a San Francisco investment bank. Together with the Director of Technology, Othar was responsible for the design, development and deployment of several innovative online securities auctions, including the OpenIPO and OpenBook systems, and he is an inventor on the OpenIPO patent.

Othar's research interests are in core artificial intelligence issues, such as search, problem-solving, constraint-satisfaction and planning. He has worked extensively on planning and scheduling applications for over ten years, and on game theory and auction design for the past five years. For the past year, he has been a Visiting Researcher at CMU working as the Integration Lead for the RADAR project.

Othar has a long history of effective teaching, beginning as an undergraduate at Columbia, where he was a TA and Head TA for 11 courses spanning the full range of computer science. At UC Berkeley, Othar served as TA for the CS150 Digital Design Lab.

While a Master's student at UCLA, Othar taught two UCLA Extension courses several times: Introductory AI and an advanced course in Search & Problem Solving. These courses were offered both at UCLA and on-site at companies such as Rockwell, TRW, etc. Othar taught the graduate AI class at USC's Electrical Engineering Department during Summer 1989. Othar taught Berkeley's "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course (CS188) as a Visiting Lecturer for the spring semester 1997.

Curriculum Vitae

Date of Birth: February 27, 1965

Address:
881 Markham Terrace
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Voice: 650-906-8642
Internet: OTHAR @ THINKBANK.COM

Education:

A. B. Columbia University, 1983-1986 (English Literature and Computer Science)
M. S. University of California, Los Angeles, 1986-1988 (Computer Science, minor in Liguistics and Graph Algorithms)
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1989-1993, 1998 (Computer Science)

Employment:

1987-96 Partner, Heuristicrats (West Hollywood and Berkeley, CA)
1992-96 Founder and Vice-President of Research, Heuristicrats Research, Inc. (Berkeley, CA)
1999-2001 Principal Developer, Managing Director, WR Hambrecht + Co, LLC (San Francisco, CA)
1996- CFO, Director, Thinkbank, Inc. (Berkeley, CA)

Patents and Awards:

1983-86 John Jay Scholar (Columbia College).
1986-89 University Fellow, RAND Corporation Fellow (UCLA).
1989-91 Shell Corporation Fellow (UC Berkeley).
1997 Two NASA Certificates of Recognition (for DS1 On-Board Planner and Scheduler) from Inventions & Contributions Board.
1999 NASA Group Achievement Award (Deep Space One Project Flight Software Team) from the NASA Administrator.
2003 US Patent 6,629,082: Auction system and method for pricing and allocation during capital formation. William R. Hambrecht, Othar Hansson, Jordan Hayes, Alan Katz, Charles Ocheret and Matt Regan.

Grants and Research Contracts:

1991-1994 Principal Investigator, "Decision-Theoretic Control of Artificial Intelligence Scheduling Systems,"

1991-1994 Principal Investigator, "Decision-Theoretic Control of Artificial Intelligence Scheduling Systems," National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
1996-1998 Principal Investigator, "Reusable Software Components For Science Planning And Spacecraft Sequencing;" National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
2004-present Integration Lead, "Radar (a Personal Assistant that Learns);" DARPA.

Selected Publications:

``Old and New Ideas for Integrating Planning and Execution.'' Othar Hansson, Jordan Hayes and Charles Ocheret. Presented at NASA Planning and Scheduling Workshop, Oxnard, California, October 1997.
``Automating mission scheduling for space-based observatories.'' Nicola Muscettola, Barney Pell, Othar Hansson, Sunil Mohan. In Robotic Telescopes: Current Capabilities, Present Developments, and Future Prospects for Automated Astronomy, G.W. Henry and J.A. Eaton (eds). ASP Conference Series, Vol. 79. Astronomical Society of the Pacific, S.F., CA. 1995.
``DTS: A Decision-Theoretic Scheduler for Space Telescope Applications.'' Chapter 13 in Intelligent Scheduling, Monte Zweben and Mark Fox (eds.), Morgan Kaufmann, 1994. (w/ A. E. Mayer)
``DTS: Building Custom Intelligent Schedulers.'' In Proceedings of i-SAIRAS-94: The 3rd International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space, Pasadena, CA, October 1994.
``Criticizing Solutions To Relaxed Models Yields Powerful Admissible Heuristics.'' Information Sciences, 63(3):207-227, 1992. (w/ A. E. Mayer and M. M. Yung)
``A New Result On The Complexity Of Heuristic Estimates For The A* Algorithm.'' Artificial Intelligence, 55(1):129-143, 1992. (w/ A. E. Mayer and M. C. Valtorta)
``Toward the Modeling, Evaluation, and Optimization of Search Algorithms.'' In Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence: The Integration of Problem-Solving Strategies, Donald Brown and Chelsea White (eds.), Kluwer, 1990. (w/ G. B. Holt and A. E. Mayer)
``Probabilistic Heuristic Estimates.'' Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, Vol 2, 1990. (w/ A. E. Mayer)
Also, articles in NASA Tech Briefs; software reviews for BYTE magazine (Purify, Microsoft Visual C++, Borland C++, SparcWorks C++, plus two unpublished).

Professional Activities:

Program committee member: AAAI-94, UAI-96, UAI-97, UAI-98.
Reviewer for NSF, Journal of Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Communications of the ACM, International Journal of Forecasting, IEEE SMC, Control-Theory and Advanced Technology, and various edited volumes.
Current or past member of AAAI, ACM, SIAM, INFORMS [ORSA].
Maintainer and sponsor of pro bono WWW sites for two AI societies: KDD and AUAI.

Courses Taught or TAed:

Artificial Intelligence, Expert Systems, Search & Problem Solving, Finite Mathematics, Discrete Mathematics, Data Structures & Algorithms, Computability & Formal Languages, Digital Design.

Representative Consulting Projects

Apple Computer. Led a comparison of web server performance (Apple, SGI, Sun, Intel PC) for use by Apple marketing. Procured equipment, designed factorial experiments, analyzed results, wrote report.
Enviz, Inc. Led development of Enviz Insight's Collection Server from initial design to version 2.0. Managed improvements to Enviz' VizScript data analysis language, including the addition of data-mining operations. Consulted with sales staff and assisted in technical sales efforts as one of Enviz Insight's architects.
Intraspect Software. Led a performance audit of their 1.0 knowledge management server product. Identified bottlenecks in Java code, suggested and implemented improvements, and designed a stress-testing simulated client. Design of test client was later folded into their Windows client design.
NASA. Software mentor for the DS-1 planning/scheduling system, part of the first spacecraft controlled by AI planning technology. Principal Investigator on two major research projects to develop advanced scheduling algorithms and software (the basis of my Berkeley dissertation).
NASA and NSF (National Science Foundation). Project manager on two grants for the development of Probability Network Language (PNL), a tool for the specification of problem-specific data-mining models. Wrote grant applications, managed research efforts and wrote up the final reports.
PostModern Computing (acquired by Visigenic). Designed and developed a 12-part Java animated tutorial for their Black Widow Java ORB.
Red Pepper Software (acquired by PeopleSoft). Designed and developed a Java applet demonstrating a future Red Pepper product. Demo was used at trade shows and in speeches by the CEO. Revised the demo a year later, after Red Pepper was acquired by PeopleSoft.
Responsive Learning Technologies. Acting CEO of this online learning start-up, co-founded with a Stanford Business School professor. Courseware product is in use in several top MBA programs. Led incubation, funding proposals, license negotiations. Thinkbank holds an equity stake. Acquired by UNext in 2000.
TCSI. Major contributor to two large network management systems (Bell Canada and British Telecom).
TimeDance. In a six-week effort for this web-based calendaring/scheduling start-up, led server architecture design and prototyping effort that supported their first round of fund-raising. In a four-month effort, played a key role in 1.0 server design and development, focusing on Server API and the underlying JDBC layer. Named the company. Thinkbank holds a minority equity stake.
University Ventures. Technology assessments and consulting for this NYC seed venture fund, looking at a variety of university-developed technologies. Thinkbank holds a minority stake in the fund.
W.R. Hambrecht & Co. Technical lead for auction management system for the OpenIPO system (www.OpenIPO.com).