Acorn's Board of Advisors
The Acorn Technologies Board of Advisors was formed in March of 2001.
The objective in forming the BoA is to connect the company to nationally recognized scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs, thus extending the company's network of expertise in order to evaluate early stage technologies and to facilitate Acorn's interaction and access to Industry. Each of our BoA members has received national and international recognition within the scientific community as well as having led critical functions for companies such as AMD, Silicon Graphics, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, MIPS, Openwave, @Home, Hewlett Packard, General Motors, and others. Furthermore, every member has very significant ties with prominent universities such as Stanford, Caltech, USC, Harvard and UCLA.
Dr. Forest Baskett
Forest joined NEA in 1999 as a Venture Partner and became a General Partner in 2004. Forest focuses on information technology investments. Present board memberships include Aeluros, Arch Rock, Atheros Communications (NASDAQ: ATHR), Audience, Catalytic, Chelsio Communications, Foveon, Fulcrum Microsystems, Luxtera, RingCube Technologies, SiBEAM, Tableau Software, and T-RAM Semiconductor. He also serves as an advisor to Cassatt, Data Domain, PolyServe, SiTime, Spreadtrum and Telegent Systems. Previous board memberships include, among others, E2O, Nanochip, and Newisys. Forest also previously held an advisory position with FineGround, ReShape and SMIC. Prior to NEA, Forest was Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. He founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation from 1982 to 1986 before joining SGI. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1971 to 1982. He also spent two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory building an operating system for the original Cray-1 computer and a year and a half at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Principal Scientist doing VLSI research. At Stanford, he worked with Andy Bechtolsheim on the SUN workstation project, with Jim Clark on the Geometry Engine project, and with John Hennessy on the MIPS microprocessor project. Dr. Baskett received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Thomas E. Everhart
After serving as Caltech's president and as professor of electrical engineering and applied physics for 10 years, Everhart stepped down to pursue other interests in 1997. During his tenure, Everhart oversaw the construction of the Beckman Institute, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Moore Laboratory of Engineering, Avery House, and the Fairchild Library, and the successful completion of the $350 million Campaign for Caltech.
In November of 1998, Everhart was elected to the Caltech Board of Trustees.
Everhart has received numerous honors and awards and has been a member of various national and international societies. He was elected to the Council of the National Academy of Engineering in 1988, and he served as chairman of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board from 1990 to 1993. From 1990 to 1996 he served as vice chairman of the Council on Competitiveness - a private, nonprofit group of prominent leaders that addresses growth and the competitive position of U.S. corporations in global markets - and he continues to serve on its executive committee. He has also conducted continuing dialogues with federal agencies concerning their support of research and teaching on campus, and with NASA in support of JPL. In addition, he sits on the boards of several large corporations including General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, and Raytheon Company.
Everhart came to Caltech from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was chancellor and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1984 to 1987. From 1979 to 1984 he served as dean of the College of Engineering and professor of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University. After earning his PhD in 1958, Everhart spent 20 years on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Everhart's research has concentrated on the generation and application of very-small-diameter electron beams, first to scanning electron microscopy and later to microfabrication. Research conducted with graduate students explored the spatial extent of electron energy dissipation in matter, secondary electron emission, electron backscattering, computer-controlled scanning electron microscopy, and other topics. He is one of the pioneers in the fabrication of electronic devices using electron beam lithography. Building on his early work in the field of scanning electron microscopy, his research provided much of the basis for forming microstructures using scanning electron beams to form desired patterns on substrates. Everhart-Thornley detectors are still used in scanning electron microscopes even though the first one was used in 1956.
In 1978, Dr. Everhart was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the electron optics of the scanning electron microscope and to its uses in electronics and biology. In further recognition of his scientific work he has also been elected a member of the Böhmische Physikalische Gesellschaft. He is a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984, and the ASEE Benjamin Garver Lamme Award in 1989. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1990.
Dr. Paul Mockapetris
Paul Mockapetris is an Internet advocate and angel. His primary research interests are in distributed systems and computer communication protocols. He is best known for creating the Domain Name System, which is the key name registration basis for the Internet. Accordingly Paul is well known as a speaker and teacher in several Internet areas.
From 2001-1999, Paul was founder and CTO for UrbanMedia, a company that provided conventional telephony and Internet services in office buildings. From 1998-1999, Paul was CTO for Fiberlane/Cerent/Siara, now Redback where he worked on high speed networking melding ASIC, SONET, and IP technologies.
During 1997, Paul was Chief Technology Officer at Software.Com, where he worked on the development of Internet infrastructure technology for messaging, directory and DNS. From 1995-1996, Paul was the second employee and Director of Engineering at @Home, a company with the mission of bringing high-performance Internet to millions via cable TV. During Paul's tenure, @Home grew from a 2-person company to a 200-person company, with production service in 3 regions and deployment underway in 10 more. From 1990-1993 Paul was the program manager for networking at ARPA, where he started and oversaw dozens of research efforts scattered across the US and Europe.
From 1978-1995, Paul was at USC's Information Sciences Institute, beginning as a graduate student and ending as Director of the High Performance Computing and Communications Division.
As an individual contributor at ISI, he is best known as the creator of the Domain Name System (DNS), and its first implementer; he worked on the design of mail systems and wrote the first implementation of SMTP; and created the infrastructure contract for the CAIRN (Dartnet II) research network. Research projects under his supervision at ISI included RSVP, Prospero, NetCheque, ATOMIC, and the Routing Arbiter. His division also ran Los Nettos, a regional network and supported Internet infrastructure through IANA and other projects.
At UC Irvine, he worked on ring interface, later commercialized by Proteon and IBM. He received his degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, in 1982.
Dr. Yoshio Nishi
Dr. Nishi is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of Nanofabrication Facility at Stanford University since May 2002. He also serves as the Chief Scientist for Texas Instruments on a part-time basis. Dr. Nishi was the first to be appointed as Chief Scientist at TI.
Previous to Stanford, Dr. Nishi was at TI, where he started as Vice President and Director of Research and Development for the Semiconductor Group in 1995, and was elected Senior Vice President in the following year. At TI, he directed research work for the Digital Signal Processing Solutions R&D Center, the Silicon Technology Development at Kilby Center, the Tsukuba R&D Center in Japan, and the Converter Product Development Center in New Jersey and Dallas. Dr. Nishi was also at Hewlett-Packard where he established and became director of the ULSI Research Laboratory, a new advanced research laboratory at HP. At HP, Dr. Nishi also served as Director of the Silicon Process Laboratory and Director of the R&D Center for Integrated Circuits Business Division.
Dr. Nishi started his professional career at Toshiba Corporation where he spent more than 20 years pioneering various semiconductor related researches. His leadership roles include the world's first CMOS 1Mb dynamic, 256Kb CMOS static and 1Mb CMOS programmable memories. With those achievements, he has been credited as a technology leader who brought Toshiba to the world as a leading memory manufacturer.
Dr. Nishi's current involvement in other activities includes:
- Board of Directors, Japan-America Society of Dallas/Fort Worth, 1999-present
- Advisory Committee, IS&T, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, 1998-present
- Governing Council, SIA Focus Center Research Programs, 1998-present
- Executive Advisory Board, MARCO/DARPA Gigascale Silicon Research Center, 1998-present
- Executive Advisory Board, MARCO Interconnect Research Center, 1998-present
- Corporate member, Dallas Japanese Association, 1998-present
- Technology Strategy Committee, SIA, 1997-present
- Board of Directors, SEMATECH and International SEMATECH, 1996-present
- Board of Directors, Semiconductor Research Corporation, 1996-present
- Policy Board, NSF/SRC ERC for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing, 1996-present
Dr. Nishi holds a B.S. in metallurgy from Waseda University and Ph.D. in electronics engineering from the University of Tokyo. Dr. Nishi has published approximately 75 papers in international technical journals and conferences and has co-authored nine books. He has been awarded more than 50 patents in the U.S. and Japan. He received IEEE Fellow Award (1987), 1995 IEEE Jack A. Morton Award for "Contributions to the basic understanding and innovative development of MOS device technology" and became 2002 IEEE Robert Noyce Medal winner for "Strategic leadership in global semiconductor research and development".
Dr. Ali Sayed
Ali H. Sayed is Professor and Chairman of Electrical Engineering at UCLA, where he also directs the UCLA Adaptive Systems Laboratory (www.ee.ucla.edu/asl). He received the degrees of Engineer and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1992.
Dr. Sayed has published widely in archival journals and conference proceedings with over 250 articles and 4 books. In particular, he is the author of the textbook Fundamentals of Adaptive Filtering, which was published by Wiley in 2003. The book provides one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatments of adaptive system analysis and design. He is also the co-author of the textbook Linear Estimation (Prentice Hall 2000), which is used as a prime reference on estimation theory and filtering algorithms. He has contributed several articles to engineering and mathematical encyclopedias and handbooks, and has served on the editorial boards of several leading scientific journals. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2003-2005) and is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing. During 2005, he served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has consulted with industry on different aspects of adaptation, estimation, and communication system design. His research group has been awarded honors and recognitions including several IEEE Best Paper Awards (1996,2002,2005), the Terman Award (2005), and the Kuwait Prize (2003). He is a Fellow of IEEE for his contributions to adaptive algorithms and estimation theory. Dr. Sayed's research interests span several areas including adaptive and statistical signal processing, estimation and filtering theories, distributed processing, and signal processing for communications.
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Dr. William Siegle
William T. (Bill) Siegle received his BSEE, MSEE and Ph.D. all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He joined IBM in 1964, the year IBM announced the historic System 360. Bill held a number of technical, management and executive roles at IBM in Poughkeepsie, Burlington, Vt, E. Fishkill and Armonk, New York. He was Director of the Advanced Technology Center in E. Fishkill which created the ASTC, IBM’s premier technology development platform through the 1990s. In 1990 he was recruited to Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale, California, where he was appointed Vice President and Chief Scientist. He directed the development of AMD’s technology platforms for logic and flash memory products, which enabled leading edge product production in new wafers fabs in Austin, Texas, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, and Dresden, Germany. In 1998 he was promoted to Sr. Vice President, responsible for AMD’s world-wide manufacturing operations in addition to his continuing role as Chief Scientist. Bill served as a member of the Board of Directors of SRC and as its chairman in 1993. He also has served on the Board of Directors of Sematech, and has been a Director of the public companies, Etec, Inc. and DuPont Photomask, Inc. He retired from AMD in April, 2005. He currently serves on the Board of Family Supportive Housing, a San Jose based non-profit dedicated to serving homeless families in the San Jose area, and also continues a limited consulting role in the industry. Bill resides in Los Gatos, California with his wife, Marylee. They have 3 grown children.