Bio
James has over 20 years of experience in leading edge software research and development. He is currently CEO and Founder of Orbital Insight -- an A-round startup funded by Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures. Orbital Insight processes satellite and aerial imagery at petabyte scale to understand national and world-wide socio-economic trends. Previously he was SVP of Science and Engineering at the Climate Corporation through its $1B acquisition by Monsanto. Before his time at Climate he was CTO and Software Architect at Moon Express -- a company with the modest goal of putting the first commercial robot on the Moon and winning the Lunar X-Prize. Previous to that he was engineering Director of Google Book Search where he was in charge of Google's project to scan, index, and make searchable the world's books, as well as the Book and Magazine stores within Google Play. He also served as EVP Engineering at Composite Software -- a startup focusing on data visualization that recently agreed to be acquired by Cisco for $180M. Before coming to Composite, James lead Autonomy and Robotics at Ames Research Center, NASA’s center of excellence for information technology, where he was responsible for almost 100 researchers. Prior to joining NASA, James led the Optimization team at i2 Technologies and worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories and co-founded the Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory (CIRL) at the University of Oregon. James has authored over fifteen papers in referred journals and conferences, and holds five patents. James holds PhD and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Math and Computer Science from Rice University.