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Derek Jacoby

Research Manager
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Victoria, BC
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qvirt.com
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derekja@qvirt.com
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250-220-0467

Experienced digital technology innovator, who has successfully built for profit companies, not for profit organizations, and collectives that blend scientific and academic knowledge into practical AI solutions on AWS, Azure, GCP, and Compute Canada.

Work Experience

University of Victoria

Research Manager
May 2017 - Current

Manage a lab of 10-20 co-ops, research assistants, and students in the Computer Science department.

Received a Microsoft AI for Earth award on using deep learning to predict patterns of algae bloom activity on the BC coast using Sentinel-3 satellite data.

Lead a National Research Council project on motion imagery that involves deep-learning based segmentation of lidar and visual imagery.

QVirt Labs Inc.

President
Jul 2016 - Current

QVirt Labs is a boutique development company founded to apply speech recognition expertise to Virtual Reality environments. Created installations at the Royal BC Museum, with Oceans Network Canada, and with Canada's Digital Supercluster.

Microsoft

Lead Program Manager
1995 - 2005

Led the Microsoft Management Console team to build a systems administration interface with over 70 partner applications in the console.

Led a team to build mobile device speech recognition experiences in Microsoft Research. Presented onstage with Bill Gates in the keynote at the 2001 joint conferences on artificial intelligence.

Led the speech server SDK team, managing a team of 20, and personally designed and developed the "How Do I" language model that allows users to ask for assistance using speech.

UrtheCast

Web developer
Jun 2015 - May 2017

Built a cloud-based application for developing satellite analysis algorithms.

Education

University of Victoria

PhD Computer Science
Jan 2011 - Dec 2016

Awarded an NSERC Canada Graduate scholarship. Developed an application on consumer-grade electroencephalography hardware to provide neurofeedback to ameliorate attention deficit disorder.

University of Victoria

Masters in Computer Science
2009 - 2011

Focused on automated and collaborative meeting recordings, producing a Windows application to allow students to jointly annotate class recordings using mobile devices and use those annotations to study from the recordings.

Patents

A partial set of my publications and patents is most easily accessed on my Google Scholar profile at https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=P6CgSSYAAAAJ