General Sensing

Team

• Philip Liang

  CEO (co-founder)

  Philip Liang is a technology entrepreneur and inventor. He was a founding member of the Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Laboratory, playing a key role in the City Car design team, which has earned a Time "invention of the year" award. He has helped numerous cities solve their problems, from helping rethink the Paris bus system to building concept water fountains. Mr Liang is an expert on rapid prototyping and also holds patents in several fields, from Robot Wheels to Social Networking. Mr Liang has given talks about entrepreneurship at MIT and has been an advisor to startups such as io2technology, the maker of the HelioDisplay. Mr. Liang has a master of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.

• Jonathan Gips

  CTO (co-founder)

  Jonathan Gips is a computer scientist who specializes in large-scale exploratory computing projects. He has worked on assignments that put health and activity sensors to use for the armed forces, that use electronic badges for data mining at conferences and events, and that use mobile applications for rich-information storage. Mr. Gips has also written several peer-reviewed papers on mobile and wearable computing. He has also worked on augmented-reality applications at the Advanced Displays and Spatial Perception Laboratory at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. Mr. Gips has a bachelor of science degree in computer science from Stanford University and a master of science degree in media arts and sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• York Liao

  Director, Scientific Advisor

  Dr. York Liao is a Hong Kong-based scientist, engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Varitronix International, one of the first manufacturers of liquid crystal displays, or LCDs. He taught in the electronics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for 10 years before founding Varitronix with two of his former faculty members. Dr. Liao earned a bachelor of science in physics from the California Institute of Technology, as well as master’s and doctoral degrees in applied physics from Harvard University.

• Hamilton Tang

  Director, Business Advisor

  Hamilton Tang is the CEO of the fund-management and investment-advisory company Simon Murray & Co., as well as a director of the company and its subsidiaries. He previously served as co-CEO of a regional entertainment company that was both the largest movie-theater operator in Hong Kong and the largest overseas cinema operator in mainland China. Mr. Tang also worked as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley in both New York and Hong Kong. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and has a law degree and MBA from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.
  
  

• Eric C. Leuthardt, MD

  CMO

  Eric C. Leuthardt, M.D. is a neurosurgeon who is currently an associate professor with the Department of Neurological Surgery and the Departments of Neurobiology and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He is Director of the Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology. He received his B.S. in Biology and Theology at St. Louis University in 1995 and received his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine in 1999. He went on to complete his training at Barnes Jewish Hospital and Washington University in St. Louis in 2005 and then completed a combined fellowship in epilepsy and spinal surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2006. His research has focused on neuroprosthetics – devices linked to the brain that may restore function to patients with motor disabilities.  His work in the field of neuroprosthetics and neurosurgical devices has yielded him numerous accolades as a scientist, a neurosurgeon, and an inventor. Dr. Leuthardt uses an integrated approach by employing multiple domains of expertise ranging from biomedical engineering, clinical neurosurgery, mathematical modeling, complex signal analysis, and computer programming. In addition to numerous peer reviewed publications, Leuthardt has over 800 patents on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for medical devices and brain computer interface technologies.

• Ryan Aylyard

  Senior electronics engineer

  Ryan Aylward is an electrical engineer who specializes in low-power and wireless-sensor design for biomedical, human-interface, performance-art and social-networking applications. He has built his technical experience developing several sensor-based badge systems designed to track and analyze sensor data, and his research on sensor networks has been published in several journals. Mr. Aylward earned a master of science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, where he studied with the responsive-environments group. Prior to that, he earned a bachelor of science degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.

• Aaron Valade

  Senior software developer

  Aaron Valade is a veteran of the large-scale Web-based publishing sector. At the International Data Group (IDG), he helped launch a new online-publishing arm within the company and, as director of software development, managed the online presence of IDG’s publications, including ComputerWorld, CIO.com and ITWorld. Prior to that, Mr. Valade developed the global knowledge-base system at Egenera. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.