Canesta

Dr. Bamji is a founder of Canesta. He has 9 years of industry experience working in Electronic Design Automation. Previously he held the position of Architect, at Cadence Design Systems. He has an SB in Math, SB in CS, SM and Ph.D. in EECS all from MIT. He has interest in and is conversant with a wide variety of technical disciplines including Physics, Math, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science. His work in the area of hierarchical layout compaction has produced a quantum improvement in the state of the art in this area and is recognized as a landmark achievement. He is the author of over 15 conference papers and journal articles presented at top rated IEEE Conferences. Of these papers, three have won the best paper award at their respective conferences. He is the inventor of 19 granted patents, with many more pending. He is also the author of a book on Leaf Cell and Hierarchical Compaction Techniques. At Canesta Dr. Bamji is involved in the design and implementation of next generation high performance time of flight detectors and pixels.

Dr. Rafii is Executive Vice President and one of the founders of Canesta, Inc. He has extensive background in system engineering and business management. His current focus is directing the system architecture group, evaluating customer solutions and developing image processing algorithms for the company's electronic perception technology. Earlier, he directed the development of Projection Keyboard application. He received his MS and Ph.D. in EECS from Stanford University. He was a founder and held the position of Vice President in Penware and atPos (now part of Symbol). He recruited the team and directed the design and development of the company's PDA, Point of Service, enterprise, and e-commerce applications. He provided technical support in closing large deals and started several technology and business development initiatives in the company. Earlier, he was a software scientist and an architect of heterogeneous object databases at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Prior to that, he was a system performance specialist at Hewlett-Packard's commercial and UNIX operating systems labs. He has published papers on 3D vision applications, system performance analysis and heterogeneous databases. He has also taught Computer Science at University of Oklahoma, U.C. Davis and Santa Clara University. He has authored and been granted several patents.

Aaron Benway is a Vice President focused on growth-stage investments and small leveraged buyouts in the U.S. telecommunications, media, technology and business services sectors. He is based in Washington, DC. Prior to joining Carlyle, Aaron was an Associate in the private equity group at Deutsche Bank. Previously, he was an officer in the U.S. Navy, first as a Nuclear Engineer aboard the USS California and then as a Staff Officer within the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mr. Benway received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy and his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Mr. Droz' expertise is in program execution and delivery of hardware and software systems. He brings his industry background and experience to Canesta to deliver CanestaVision technology into the marketplace worldwide. Previously, Mr. Droz served as Sr. Director of Engineering at Cylink Corporation (now SafeNet) where his team developed and supported Cylink's core LAN and WAN hardware encryption products into multinational finance and government institutions. Prior to Cylink, Mr. Droz led hardware development efforts in embedded and web-based signature capture payment terminals at @POS.com. Mr. Droz also held engineering positions at EDJ Enterprises and IBM, concentrating in design and development of network infrastructure products and store-system (point-of-sale) products. Mr. Droz holds an MSEE from North Carolina State University and a BSEE from the Unversity of Virginia. Our company is pleased to be a member of the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA). The organization encourages the relationship between fabless companies and suppliers; facilitates business partnerships; creates awareness of and promotes the fabless business model; disseminates relevant data; and fosters standards and policies.

Professor Sebastian Thrun is the Director of the Stanford AI Lab, home to more than 120 researchers at Stanford University, California. He recently changed to Stanford from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was an associate professor and held an endowed chair. Thrun has pioneered the area of probabilistic robotics, but also pursues research on machine learning, AI, and multi-agent systems. Thrun has won several best paper awards (AAAI-98, DAGM-98, ICRA-00, AAMAS-03, FSR-03, ICRA-03), and is a frequent keynote speaker at international conferences in AI and robotics (KI-05, ICAR-05, IROS-04, ICML-02, UAI-02, ECAI-02, NIPS-01, BNAIC-01, IJCAI-01, FSR-01). Thrun has published over 275 papers, including seven books and edited volumes, and he serves on the editorial board of a number of journals in robotics and AI. He was general chairperson of the 2003 NIPS conference and the 1998 CONALD conference, and is the founding chair of the 2005 Robotics Science and Systems conference.