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A Two Year Recruiting Success: SportsVisio Taps Industry Vet Oblinger for Inaugural CTO

We're proud to announce & introduce our first-ever CTO Dan Oblinger... with a brief letter from Dan himself!

"During the 15+ years I have known Jason (Syversen, SportsVisio's CEO) as a close friend and colleague I have always appreciated his leadership style and ability to execute. Since our days at DARPA we have been actively looking for a way to join forces, indeed I was one of the first people Jason called when he had his epiphany to use AI-driven stats to serve an unaddressed market.

Over the last 2 years I have enjoyed being a sounding board for many technical aspects of Sportsvisio's execution, and now that I have sold my previous company, I am in a great position to (finally) join forces with Jason as the CTO for SportsVisio.  Independent of my connection to Jason, I have also been watching the Cambrian explosion of startups that are building upon recent advances in deep learning with an eye towards founding or joining one.  Many transformative new companies will be born during this period---I am thrilled to now be part of this revolution!"  

- Dan Oblinger, CTO

Dan's experience: 

Dan began his research career with a PhD in Machine Learning from U Illinois, working at IBM Research, and teaching at Columbia University. During that time authored many first tier publications and 25+ patents. Building from this individual contributor work he joined DARPA (alongside Jason) and funded over $200M in R&D focusing on Machine Learning as applied to Vision and Natural Language Processing. Within Dan’s, "Machine Reading” program IBM built the Watson system used to beat the best human Jeopardy player at answering open ended natural language questions.  After DARPA he moved to silicon valley where he has founded and exited three companies, including an AI-based clean tech company and a robotics company with a general purpose in dexterous eldercare robot that required building out a 40+ person Ph.D. team spanning a dozen plus subspecialties.