Draft:Rob Tow

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Robert F. Tow (born 1954) is an

gestural user interfaces (UIs), augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI).[1]. His work is (partly) documented by 18 patents[2], ten academic publications and four published audio recordings[1]

Early life and education

He was born in Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Japan, while his father was stationed as a lawyer for the US Air Force during the Korean War.  At the age of 2, his family returned to the US and stayed at the Air Force’s officer's married quarters in Denver, Colorado.  (Buzz Aldrin and Joan Aldrin were in the same apartment building, and played bridge with his parents. Buzz also visited him after Robert’s father’s passing.)  Later, his family returned to Iowa where his parents are from and he was raised there.

He graduated from Grinnell College with a bachelor of science[1]. As an undergraduate, he conducted research on the effect of ganzfelds of different colors on hallucination onset time and intensity with subjects who had consumed LSD. This was under the guidance of Thomas Brozowski.  (This topic is still under study.[3]).  Other research topics included photolithography and studies on the pleasure center in rats.

Career

After graduating, he took a position at Northrop Defense Systems (now part of Northrup Grumman). He designed and implemented radar signal processing and electronic warfare algorithms which were demonstrated for B-52 bombers.

Soon after he moved to Silicon Valley, and took several positions. Highlights include:

  • Member of the research staff at XEROX PARC, where he filed four patents on "data glyphs"[4]. He also received a patent for the design of an amorphous silicon document scanner that was inherently perceptually color-correct[2].
  • A lead engineer on the multi-user/multi-world “Placeholder”[5] virtual reality project funded by Interval Research and the Banff Centre. It included features such as spatialized audio. Other research topics included affective computing (including two patents[6]) and video search, all of which were very advanced for the time and still the subjects of ongoing research[7][8].
  • Technology consultant at AT&T Labs’ Menlo Studio (Menlo Studio is now closed).  There he created a concept design for a small wearable video escrow recording device called “Fair Witness” (the name is taken from “Stranger in a Strange Land”).  Fair Witness[9] was based on the Kava Project[10], a compact wearable computer system based on Linux.  Robert directed its creation and served as system architect and group leader.  The Kava Project was an open source hardware and open source software platform -- the first such approved by AT&T’s legal department.
  • Graduate studies thesis advisor and guest lecturer for the Art Center College of Design’s graduate Media Studies and Industrial Design departments and the Graduate Media Design Program at California College of the Arts. As part of his advising, he contributed a chapter on deciding "What to Do Next (and How to Do it)" which appears in the book “Design Research: Methods and Perspectives[11]”. The title of the chapter is "Strategy, Tactics, and Heuristics for Research: A Structuralist Approach[12]".
  • Senior staff engineer at
    Sun Microsystems Laboratories. There he was part of the Sun SPOT Project[13], developing wireless sensors and networks. He filed more than six patents there, participated in a design study with NASA/JPL for the Deep Space Array Network, and co-invented a novel tamper-respondent crypto key device developed for US Navy SPAWAR
    .
  • Senior technology strategist in the Strategic Business Development Office at NASA Ames. Successes included a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Sun Microsystems and NASA for multi-million dollar value in five areas of collaboration covering supercomputing, open source development, and wireless sensor networks.
  • Contributing to several other projects such as:
    • Fonly Institute
    • Liquid Robotics
    • Texas Instruments
    • Skully Helmets
    • Bsquare for Toyota Partner Robots and
      Toyota Research Institute
    • Nuvation Engineering
    • SyncThink
    • Glynt AI
    • NeuroGeneces

Personal life

Robert’s partner is Brenda Laurel.  He has three daughters and two cats.  He is the eldest of three brothers.

He has known many notable people such as the Merry Pranksters, Timothy Leary, Terrance McKenna, Ivan Sutherland, John Perry Barlow, Lee Felsenstein and Rodney Brooks.

Robert maintains a broad set of interests including: philosophy (such as Stoicism, Foucault and Plato’s political theory), geopolitics, astrobiology (especially as it relates to the Fermi paradox), nuclear arms, nuclear fusion, science fiction (especially Star Trek and Neal Stephenson), and abalone diving.  He also enjoys aspects of Japanese culture such as Kurosawa films and haikus (perhaps because of his birth country), and styles himself as a “digital ronin”.  Other things from Asia he also enjoys are Sun Tzu’s Art of War and the Confucian Analects. He is read widely--from Albert Camus to Elaine Pagels (Revelations : visions, prophecy, and politics in the book of Revelations[14]) to Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle). He is a proponent of the ideals of the Enlightenment[15]

References

  1. ^ a b c "Rob Tow Resume". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  2. ^ a b "Google Patents". patents.google.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  3. PMID 33122651
    .
  4. ^ ""DataGlyph" Embedded Digital Data". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  5. ^ "Placeholder VR Project". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  6. ^ ""Birds and Bees" Emotional Robot". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  7. ISSN 1875-9521
    .
  8. ISSN 2673-4192
    .
  9. ^ ""Fair Witness" Wearable Escrow Video Device". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  10. ^ ""Kava" Open Source Wearable Computer". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  11. ^ "Design Research". MIT Press. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  12. ^ "Strategy, Tactics, and Heuristics for Research". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  13. ^ "Sun "SPOT" Wireless Sensor Networks". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  14. ISBN 978-0-670-02334-9
    .
  15. ^ "The Lost Millenial Whole Earth Catalog Pages". www.tauzero.com. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
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