Best Startup
At Best Startup US we track over 1,000,000 US startups and over 3 million people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top United States based CTO’ operating in the Education space. If you think a CTO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.us.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Jerome Fodor
CTO of TOOTRiS
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About TOOTRiS: TOOTRiS is a technology platform that allows parents affordable access to high-quality Child Care, anytime, anywhere.
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Noah Pryor
CTO of Teachable
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About Teachable: Teachable is a venture-backed company that allows anyone to create and sell online courses.
Don Prodehl
Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice president Technology of EVERFI
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About EVERFI: EVERFI is an education technology company that provides learners of all ages education for the real world.
Rafael Garcia
Co-Founder & CTO of Clever
Rafael leads the technical team and is in charge of all product engineering. Prior to co-founding Clever, Rafael worked at Jump Trading, where he specialized in machine learning and working with large volumes of data. Rafael holds a BA degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Harvard. He is a native of Naperville, IL, and lives in San Francisco, CA.
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About Clever: Clever is a digital learning platform designed for K12 schools and used by 22 million students and teachers.
Harald Schafer
Chief Technology Officer of comma.ai
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About comma.ai: comma is solving self driving cars while delivering shippable intermediaries: openpilot and the comma two.
Severin Hacker
CTO & Co-founder of Duolingo
Severin Hacker a computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, has created a technology that could transform the way we communicate with one another in a more connected, globalized society. Duolingo is a language learning program that teaches anyone who can access the Internet or a smartphone any number of languages. Right now, they have 10 million users. Learning a language can be time consuming and costly, but Duolingo seems to avoid both of these problems. The program itself is free, and it focuses on an interactive game-based model where you answer questions and practice speaking with immediate feedback on pronunciations. Helping people learn languages is just the beginning. Severin’s long-term vision is to make quality education accessible to everyone.
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About Duolingo: Duolingo is a language-learning education platform that offers 98 total courses across nearly 40 distinct languages.
Saul Diez-Guerra
CTO of Thinkful
Saul leads the engineering team at Thinkful to build simple solutions that help deliver a learning experience worthy of the digital age, while keeping the humans at the center of it. He started his career doing social network R&D at Telefónica, the world’s 10th largest telco. After a stint working on his own education startup, he enlisted in Ampush in San Francisco, where he built ad bidding systems. A tinfoil-hat privacy nut, micro-targeting finally creeped him out enough to jump back from ad-tech to ed-tech, joining Thinkful. Born with Dilbert’s Knack and raised with a computer as a perpetual roommate, Saul started coding and playing with electronics early. Having earned both a BEng in Computer Science as well as a BSc in Telecommunications, he still learns best by breaking things.
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About Thinkful: Thinkful provides 1-on-1 learning with industry experts to bring high growth tech careers to their students.
Paritosh Gupta
Co-founder, CTO of Orai
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About Orai: Orai is an AI speech coach that helps people sound more confident in meetings and presentations.
Shailu Tipparaju
Co-Founder & CTO of Examity
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About Dallas Venture Capital, Examity, Strateology: Examity is an online exam proctoring company.
Sam Solomon
CTO of Brilliant.org
Sam is the lead developer at Alltuition and architects all of our Planners. When he’s not at the office (rare), Sam builds robots and helps organize a national college-level air and ground robotics competition.He can also fix almost anything including replacing brake pads, rewiring phone patch-bays, repairing an intelligent lighting control console, returning an jammed old dead bolt system to like new working condition and optimizing a 10,000 watt sound system.He studied Computer Science at Illinois Institue of Technology and manages Alltuition’s data and systems.
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About Brilliant.org: Brilliant delivers digital interactive STEM learning experiences to students, professionals, and lifelong learners around the world.
Alex Johnson
CTO & Co-Founder of Plotly
Alex is Plotly’s CTO and the instigator of Plotly.js. He also consults for Microsoft Research and the Center for Quantum Devices at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, focusing on data acquisition for quantum computing experiments. Alex holds a BS in Physics from Harvey Mudd College and a PhD in Physics from Harvard University. He has 20 peer reviewed publications, including 2006 paper of the year in Science, and other top journals including Nature, Physical Review Letters, and Journal of Power Sources. He has previously worked in the fields of semiconductor optics, quantum information, magnetic resonance imaging, hydrogen fuel cells, and photovoltaic power.
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About Plotly: Plotly is a data science and AI company that makes it easy to create and deploy interactive web apps in any programming language.
Oliver Hurst-Hiller
CTO & Head of Product of DonorsChoose
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About DonorsChoose, DonorsChoose: DonorsChoose is a nonprofit classroom funding site for public school teachers.
JJ Fliegelman
Co-Founder & CTO of WayUp
Co-founder & CTO of WayUp.
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About WayUp: WayUp connects students with jobs during and after college — from summer internships to part-time gigs to full-time jobs after graduation.
Tyler Evans
CTO of BTC Media
Tyler Evans is the CTO of BTC Media
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About Bitcoin Magazine, BTC Media, BTC Media, Coincart, UTXO Management, yBitcoin: BTC Media is Bitcoin media group, providing education and information through its family of products and services.
Aaron Bridges
Vice President & CTO of OpenSesame
Aaron Bridges is the Chief Technology Officer at OpenSesame.
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About OpenSesame: OpenSesame is an e-learning company that provides online training courses for businesses and employees.
Byron Hsu
Co-Founder, President, CTO of Paragon One
Founder at Paragon One.
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About Founders Pledge, Paragon One: Paragon One turns company work into scalable remote externships that help students gain hands-on work experience in different industries.
Christopher Ciabarra
CTO and Co Founder of Athena Security
Co-founder, CTO at Athena Security
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About : Athena’s mission is to save lives by preventing crimes like active shooter situations with AI Gun Detection Software and detecting a fever.
Kevin Law
Co-founder, CTO of Cambly
Kevin Law is Founder at Cambly.
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About Cambly: On-demand access to English tutors over video chat.
Raymond Murthi
Co-Founder & CTO of Going Merry
Raymond Murthi is the Co-Founder & CTO at Going Merry.
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About Going Merry: Going Merry makes it easy for students to find and apply for financial aid. We are used by students & counselors at 1 in 3 US high schools.
Scott Mercer
CTO of Torch
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About Torch: Torch is a leadership development platform that provides coaching, software, and feedback to raise performers to the next level.
Philip Smolen
Co-Founder, CTO of Trade Ideas
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About Trade Ideas: Trade Ideas provides idea generation technology and real-time risk management analytics to investors.
Sharat Israni
Exec Dir & CTO, Bakar Computational Health Sci Institute of University of California, San Francisco
Sharat Israni is the Exec Dir & CTO, Bakar Computational Health Sci Institute at UCSF.
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About University of California, San Francisco: Director of the Lab for Advanced Cytometry (LAC) and the Sony Biotechnology Center at UCSF in the Department of Laboratory Medicine
Chris Murphy
Co-Founder/CTO of Creator Arcade
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About Creator Arcade: Learn Electronic Dance Music alongside the world’s most popular DJ’s
James Kenigsberg
Chief Technology Officer – Founding Team of 2U
I am an entrepreneur and technology evangelist who finds the passion and fun in using technology to improve education.As a member of the founding team at 2U, Inc. and Chief Technology Officer, I was given an amazing opportunity to transform my passion for how technology can change the world into creating award-winning learning management platforms, client relationship management systems, mobile applications, and cloud-based architectures from scratch. That said, I take the most pride in building the most impressive and driven technology team in the industry. In the past, I led the technology and product team at The Princeton Review where I created and managed the company’s award-winning assessment products. Previous to that I was a part of technology and product development at Thomson Financial and Ogilvy & Mathers. I take pride in hard work, fun, and the art of creating and delivering technology solutions that work with ease. I also take great pride in my heritage, my family, learning, and being a self-pronounced meat-a-terian. And while you might not expect to beat me in a push up contest, you can rest assured that the technologies I deliver will be innovative, efficient, and high quality. Specialties Education Technology, Cloud-Computing (EC2), Salesforce CRM, Student Information Systems, Strategy, Technology and Business Partnership, Customer-Focus, Rapid Turnarounds and Reengineering, Quality Assurance, Technical Innovation, Budget Management, Risk Management, Project Management, Software Development Lifecycle, Agile Techniques, Vendor Management and Building and Managing Teams
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About 2U: 2U is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service platform that provides schools with the comprehensive operating infrastructure.
Nicholas Diao
CTO & Co-Founder of Coursedog
Nicholas Diao is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Coursedog.
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About Coursedog: Coursedog builds software that powers Higher Education.
Nathan Esquenazi
Co-founder and CTO of CodePath
I’ve been working professionally at early-stage startups for the last 10 years developing for web, mobile and desktop across many platforms. I have always been passionate about education, actively tutoring in college, holding workshops for students and volunteering to teach practical technical skills to those that want to learn them. I am passionate about open-source and I am the creator and maintainer of the Padrino ruby web framework.
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About CodePath, Miso: CodePath is a nonprofit increasing diversity in tech by transforming CS college education.
Oleg Pravdin
CTO of Lingualeo
Oleg Pravdin is Technical Director at Lingualeo.
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About Lingualeo: Lingualeo.com is an online service for learning and practicing English, used by 17 million people around the world!
Phil Cowan
CTO of The WISE App
Phil has been in the professional realm for over 20 years and brings his passion for programming and design to every level of the WISE application. As CTO Phil leads the development team continuing to improve the WISE application and all parts of the software product offering. Phil created the original WISE engine and continues to improve upon it every day while managing the rest of the WISE developers. Inspired by data driven applications, application architecture, and high-end development, Phil has mastered programming in some of the toughest languages. Both an exceptional programmer and designer, Phil is able to integrate his abilities to create unique solutions with amazing results. Phil has done work for such big names as Medtronic, Musicland, General Mills, Disney, Warner Brothers, Budweiser, and Pixar to name a few.
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About The WISE App: The WISE App is a mobile application that scans and grades 30, 60, and 100 question multiple choice questions instantly.
Pradeep Gaddam
CTO and Co-Founder of WeAdmit
Pradeep Gaddam is the CTO and Co-Founder at WeAdmit.
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About WeAdmit: WeAdmit guides high school students through the complexity of college admissions, help them discover their passion, and achieve their goals.
Janet Walkow
Executive Director & Chief Technology Officer of The University of Texas at Austin
Janet Walkow joined the faculty of the University of Texas in 2008, building on a successful career in the pharmaceutical industry, where she led efforts ranging from R&D to corporate strategy. Leading the Drug Dynamic Institute, a collaborative research center, Janet brings together scientists and investigators to work on novel solutions for disease and healthcare issues. The institute partners with university, industry and community leaders to foster collaborations and develop ways to eliminate barriers to commercialization opportunities. Following her pharmaceutical executive career, Janet founded MxV, llc, where she had the opportunity to work in a variety of business settings and lead strategic planning, communications and integration activities for companies ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 100. Her success and expertise in both scientific and business arenas blends technical, analytical and leadership skills, allowing Janet to effectively manage research programs, develop business strategies and successfully launch products and programs in the marketplace. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Health Promotion Council of Pennsylvania and the Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Leadership Board.
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About Austin Technology Incubator, The University of Texas at Austin: University of Texas is an educational institution that provides undergraduate, graduate, and research programs.
Derrick Mar
CTO and Founder of Pathrise
Derrick Mar is a Founder and CTO at Pathrise. He is a former Software Engineer at Facebook. Mr. Mar received a bachelor of business administration in Business Administration and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.
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About Pathrise: Pathrise is an online mentorship program for tech professionals that provides training, and advice to help in landing the next job.
Juan Pablo Mejia
Co-Founder and CTO of BabySparks
Juan Pablo Mejia is the founder of Intellecting, a company that specializes in creating and implementing web-enabled IT solutions. Juan Pablo worked for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) where he was the creator of UN’s most visited portal. Juan Pablo has a degree in Industrial Engineering, with a concentration in Information Technology (IT) from The University of Los Andes in Colombia. He has an advanced degree from ICN Business School (France) where he specialized in International Management, again focusing on IT.
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About BabySparks: BabySparks is a developer of tools and programs to help parents engage their babies and toddlers in the critical areas of early development.
Dean McRobie
CTO of CommonBond
Dean McRobie leads CommonBond’s engineering and technology teams including loan platforms, web technology, and operations and support. Prior to his tenure at CommonBond, Dean served as CTO of L2, a digital marketing research company, and CTO of Annalect, a data agency in the Omnicom advertising network. His background includes 10 years of technology consulting for telecommunication, government, and startup clients at Sapient Consulting. Originally from New Zealand, Mr. McRobie holds a BSc(Hons) from the University of Otago.
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About Agio, CommonBond: CommonBond was founded in 2012 to help relieve the student loan burden, and since then we’ve funded over $4 billion in better loans.
Ethan Sutin
Co-founder/CTO of Squad
Ethan has been coding since he was 6 years old and is passionate about the intersection of social cognition and computer science. He spent 4 years as the lead engineer at Harvard’s Implicit Bias Project. His career spans low-level programming languages for container security to front-end mobile development at GoGrid, Sysdig and Code for America. Ethan holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from the University of Missouri and a pursued a Master’s of Science in Computer Science from the University of Virginia (incomplete). Follow Molly on TwitterGet FeaturedSend Feedback
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About Squad: Acquired by Twitter in 2020. Hang out with friends in audio and video rooms.
Mac Lara
CTO of Lessons.com
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About Lessons.com: Lessons.com is an educational platform that connects teachers and students with one another.
Oliver Lubin
CTO of Triad Behavioral Health
Oliver is an entrepreneur and co-founder of thredUP.com, the largest online consignment and thrift store. He has over 20 years of creative, marketing and product experience and over 10 years of founding, fostering, and scaling startups from fundraising and pivots to rapid growth and hiring. Oliver has boundless creativity and enthusiasm for new ideas, and is particularly intrigued by the intersection of healthcare, medical data and technology. He received a Masters in Healthcare Technology Management from Marquette University and a BA in Computer Science from Boston College.
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About Triad Behavioral Health: Triad Behavioral Health’s mission is to provide educational resources to behavioral health specialists.
Giacomo Marinangeli
CTO & Co-Founder of Cloud Academy
With a Computer Science background, Giacomo has a long experience as a Sr. Software Engineer and Project Manager on several IT Projects for small and big companies. He loves creating products with Python, Django, Linux, PostgreSQL and Javascript.
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About Cloud Academy: The best enterprise e-learning platform for cloud technologies including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and the DevOps ecosystem
Dave Chavez
Chief Technology Officer of zSpace
David brings 20 years of experience in start-up companies, working with technologies ranging from GSM infrastructure to laptops, printers, PDAs and smartphones, in both consumer and commercial product spaces. He has managed product development teams through the full range of the product life cycle, from initial concept to volume production. David has extensive experience working with suppliers and manufacturing partners worldwide, with a particular emphasis in Asia. He has held various positions in product development organizations such as pen-based computer companies GO & EO, Hewlett Packard, and Handspring.
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About zSpace: zSpace offers a system that enables its users to integrate their normal lives with a desktop-based virtual reality system.
Ilya Gorelik
Co-Founder & CTO of VirtualJobShadow
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About VirtualJobShadow, VirtualJobShadow: Strivven Media is a leading developer of high-tech, career exploration products for students.
Cynthia Haynie
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Campus Management
As Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Campus Management, Cynthia L. Haynie is responsible for creating and leading the company’s technology vision and strategy as a global provider of solutions for higher education. Ms. Haynie’s 25 years of software development experience encompasses leadership of global resources for product research and development, involving both new products and the migration of complex enterprise software systems. Her early career was with Martin Marietta and IBM, where Ms. Haynie led engineering teams to support the Department of Defense and NASA initiatives. Most recently, she served as Chief Technology Officer at SolArc, Inc., a global provider of commodity trading and risk management solutions. Prior to SolArc, she served in various executive capacities at Rome Corporation, a venture-funded start-up company, and Caminus Corporation, a public company acquired by Sungard, both of which provided trading and risk management software solutions serving the highly regulated energy sector. Ms. Haynie holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas A & M and Masters degrees in Information Systems from Denver University and Technology Management from Pepperdine University.
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About Anthology, Campus Management: Campus Management is a provider of software, strategies and services which enable institutions of higher education to offer dynamic models.
Zhen Shao
Co-Founder and CTO of Parent Lab Inc.
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About Parent Lab Inc.: ParentLab helps parents connect and grow with their children through insightful, research-based content.
Dave Gardner
CTO of Legends of Learning
Dave has over 20 years experience in software engineering, product development, data applications and digital communications. Prior to his current position as CTO at Legends of Learning, Dave was CTO at ed-tech startup Quad Learning. He has also led digital projects for Fortune 500s, federal agencies and non-profits as a Partner at Fleishman-Hillard. Dave previously directed product and engineering for Match.com International and was a lead software and data engineer at The Motley Fool. Dave graduated from Duke University with a BS in Mathematics.
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About Legends of Learning: Legends of Learning is an e-learning platform focused on game-based learning to advance education.
Naeem ul Haq
Co-founder and CTO of Educative
Naeem ul Haq is the Co-founder and CTO at Educative
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About Educative: Educative provides interactive and adaptive courses for software developers with pre-configured developer environments in the cloud.
Chhay Chhun
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of KidPass
Chhay is the co-founder and CTO at KidPass. Chhay runs engineering and oversees the technical strategy of the company, and is dedicated to building a team of world-class engineers to modernize parenting. Chhay has an extensive background in web development and project management at The Economist, Time Out NY, and Forbes. Raised in the Bronx, Chhay has a deep-rooted love for NYC and believes KidPass will make the city a better place for raising families. Chhay received his BA from Harvard.
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About KidPass, NY Tech Mixer: KidPass is the new way for parents to discover and book amazing kids activities.
Arjun Nagendran
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Mursion
Arjun completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Manchester, UK, specializing in landing mechanisms for Unmanned Air Vehicles. Prior to Mursion, he worked for several years as an academic researcher leading the ground vehicle robotic system for Team Tumbleweed, which was one of the six-finalists at the Ministry of Defense (UK) Grand Challenge. During his academic career, he has contributed to several projects and manuscripts including the development of a robot to explore the Great Egyptian Pyramid, adaptive robots to catch fast-moving objects, and robots that can grasp objects of any shape. The latter parts of his academic career were focused on developing camera-based computer vision systems to detect faults in railroad tracks, aerial video gathering platforms for action recognition, and the bridging of virtual reality and robotics to impact social behavior in people.
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About Mursion: Mursion, a virtual reality environment or platform where professionals practice and master the complex interpersonal skills.
Alex Tze-Pin Cheng
Chief Technology Officer of VIPKID
Alex Tze-Pin Cheng is the Chief Technology Officer at VIPKid.
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About VIPKID: VIPKid connects teachers in North America with children around the world for real-time English immersion learning online
Steve Gacka
CTO, Founding Engineer of Startups.com
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About Startups.com: Startups.com helps over 1 million startup companies find customers, funding, mentors, and world-class education.
Albert Wang
Cofounder & CTO of Cellabus
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About Cellabus: Cellabus is a Mobile Device Management and Application Platform for Education that helps schools manage large number of disparate devices
Tim Trinidad
Founder, CTO of Schoology
Tim is the Co-Founder of Schoology Inc. and serves as its Chief Technology Officer and Lead Architect. He is responsible for the architecture of the Schoology application as well as the design and scalability of the back-end infrastructure.
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About New York CTO Club, Schoology: Schoology provides a user-centric learning management system that makes it easy to create and share academic content.
Aneesh Seth
CTO of Kalvie
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About AngelLoop, Instago, Kalvie: Kalvie develops an online learning platform for professional tutors and students.
Ben Lund
CTO of Academia.edu
Ben studied Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Before joining Academia.edu, Ben worked for Nature and as a freelance web developer building web applications for researchers and medics.
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About Academia.edu: Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers.
Sarath Bethapudi
Chief Technology Officer of Liaison International
Sarath, Liaison’s chief technology officer, has been at Liaison since 2013. He spearheaded the development and rollout of the company’s multi-tenant SaaS platform for graduate school admissions management and currently heads a cross-functional, globally distributed engineering team. Under his guidance, the team focuses on software development, data analytics, quality assurance and IT/Cloud ops. Before Liaison, Sarath served as the senior director and chief enterprise architect at the New England Journal of Medicine. In that role, he led technology initiatives to modernize and integrate various digital publications. Sarath has also worked as director of technology architecture at Accenture LLP and as a development manager at Ness Technologies, where he was responsible for delivering large-scale software developments, Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) products and enterprise systems integration solutions for Fortune 100 clients across North America. He holds a B. Tech in Computer Sciences Engineering from Mangalore University.
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About Liaison International: Liaison International helps higher education institutions better identify, recruit, enroll and retain best-fit students.
James Richards
VP Engineering & CTO of Udacity
James Richards is Vice President of Engineering at Udacity. Prior to joining Udacity he worked at Nest Labs, leading server-side development teams. During his time at Nest, he oversaw the release of several versions of the thermostat, smoke detector, and security camera focusing on the interaction model of these IoT devices. James also was an early engineer and leader at LinkedIn. Over his eight years he built and lead teams helping LinkedIn scale to hundreds of millions of users and thousands of employees.
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About Udacity: Udacity develops an online learning platform offering programs in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics sector.
Jim Davis
Vice Provost IT & CTO of University of California, Los Angeles
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About University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university offering a variety of academic programs.
Jason Olim
Co-Founder & CTO of ClassTag
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About ClassTag, JustFamily: ClassTag is a parent-teacher communication platform that allows teachers and parents to easily engage with one-another and share resources.
Nick Woods
Co-Founder and CTO of Hazel Health
Nick Woods co-founded Hazel Health with the goal of increasing healthcare access for underserved children and families. He serves the organization as its Chief Technology Officer where he has responsibility for the technology direction, product architecture, hiring, and development of a comprehensive end-to-end custom telehealth solution. Nick is a software leader, engineer, and entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience developing, innovating, and managing products and teams across a diverse set of industries and technologies. He received his undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University where he graduated first in his class.
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About Hazel Health: Hazel Health is a healthcare company that improves the health and well-being of students by increasing access to healthcare.
Andrew Fernandez
Co-Founder & CTO of Sawyer
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About Sawyer: Sawyer is an online marketplace to discover and book activities, camps, and classes.
Matt Diebolt
CTO of Poll Everywhere
Matthew Diebolt is the Chief Technology Officer for Poll Everywhere. Prior to his executive role, he served for almost 10 years as Poll Everywhere’s Director of Engineering, where he oversaw a team of engineers and led the transition of the software to modern multi-page apps. He holds a degree in Mathematics from University of California, Berkeley.
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About Poll Everywhere: Poll Everywhere is a web, SMS, and Twitter polling service that allows users to submit votes or comments to a PowerPoint or Keynote slide.
John Paul Benini
Co-Founder & CTO of Elemental Path
John Paul (JP) Benini is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Elemental Path — the company making smart toys smarter through its flagship product, the CogniToys Dino.
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About Care.com, Elemental Path, Majestyk Apps, Queerly Health, Velocimetrics: Voice intelligence platform easily customized to quickly launch voice enabled products. Launched CogniToys in 2015.
Henry Poole
Board Member & CTO of The Shift Network
Henry Poole is the CEO at CivicActions.
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About CivicActions, The Shift Network: Shift Network is an internet-based transformational education firm covering areas from spiritual growth to enlightened business, and more.
Royal O’Brien
Chief Technology Officer of Planet3
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About Forthright Entertainment, Planet3, TurboPlay: Planet3 is an exploration-based learning company that presents the entire Earth as a living laboratory.
Catalin Voss
Co-Founder and CTO of Ello
Catalin Voss is a Co-Founder and the Chief Technology Officer at Trustle. Heis a German student entrepreneur at Stanford University. Voss founded the computer vision startup Sension during his freshman year at Stanford’s startup accelerator [StartX](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/startx), where he is an Innovator in Residence. Session gained traction for developing expression recognition software used in education and for developing a Google Glass app to aid people with Autism in recognizing social cues. Before, Voss worked in mobile software engineering with the startup PayNearMe. Voss grew up and graduated from Leonardo Da Vinci Gymnasium high school near Heidelberg, Germany. He was interested in technology from a young age. When he was twelve, he taught himself the basics of mobile software development when iPhone apps first became popular. A year later, he started a German podcast about iOS development. Voss’s tutorials quickly gained > 200,000 views and became the #1 podcast on the German iTunes store. In 2009, he began working with a startup in Stuttgart on iPhone apps for the U.S. Army stationed in Europe and launched five applications before he turned 15. [Steve Capps](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Capps) hired Voss as a software engineer in 2010 to work on his Silicon Valley startup PayNearMe’s mobile product. Voss worked on the company’s iPhone, Android, and web platforms and helped launch a mobile cash payments platform. In 2012, Voss joined Stanford University at age 17 to pursue a degree in Computer Science (advisee of Professors [Terry Winograd](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Winograd) and Jerry Cain). During the same year, Voss advised the executive team of Germany’s largest media company Axel Springer on structuring a technology partnership between a Silicon Valley outpost and Germany. His role gained national attention when the German magazine DER SPIEGEL covered his work in 2013. Today, As an IIR in the StartX program, Voss advises StartX’s founders on mobile engineering.
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About DukaConnect Inc, Ello, Handle Financial, Sension: The world’s first AI reading coach that works with real books.
Travis Moore
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Distributed Machines
Travis Moore is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Distributed Machines.
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About Distributed Machines, Everipedia, Frax Finance: Distributed Machines, Inc. serves as a parent company for ventures in the blockchain, distributed ledger and education industry.
Michael Flexer
Co-Founder, CTO of Duck Duck Moose
Co-Founder and CTO at Duck Duck Moose.
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About Duck Duck Moose: Duck Duck Moose (a subsidiary of Khan Academy) is an award-winning creator of educational mobile apps for children.
James Stanger
Chief Technology Evangelist of CompTIA
James Stanger has consulted with corporations, governments and learning institutions worldwide about security, open source, network administration and IT education for over 20 years. Organizations include IBM, NTT Japan, Symantec, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), New Horizons, the US Department of Defence (DoD), the United Arab Emirates Cultural Division, the Open University (UK), the US Department of State, Mesei University and CSRA. An award-winning author, blogger and technologist, he has developed IT-based education and certification programs used around the world, and currently works as Chief Technology Evangelist at CompTIA, the world’s largest provider of IT certification.
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About CompTIA: Computing Technology Industry Association focuses on advancing the growth of the information technology industry.
Charles Christiansen
Chief Technology Officer of Ogment
Before coming to Ogment, Charles was most recently developing applications at MIT. Before that Charles spent more than a decade at ICI/Follett as one of the Principal Architects of the Lycea platform. He is co-author of Java and Flex Integration Bible (ISBN-13 978-0470400746). The book provides information and code samples designed to help the reader learn to write rich web applications using Java and Flex. He holds a Master of Science in Internet Engineering from the Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, VT.
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About Ogment: Create engaging, relevant lessons your way with Ogment.
Graham McNicoll
CTO of Education.com
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About Education.com, GrowthBook: Education.com provides teachers and parents with the learning resources.
Paul Kim
Chief Technology Officer of Stanford Graduate School of Education
An education technology entrepreneur, Dr. Kim leads initiatives involving the design of learning technologies, educational research, and community development. In a trans-disciplinary project aiming to promote innovation and competition by constructing a Programmable and Open Mobile Internet (POMI 2020), Dr. Kim designs and implements mobile technologies and social learning environments. In 2009, Dr. Kim founded Seeds of Empowerment, a 501(C3) non-profit global education incubator for social innovations leveraging mobile technologies. Under his direction and leadership, Stanford undergraduate and graduate students carry out mobile-social educational research and development in real-world classrooms and virtual learning environments. Dr. Kim serves on the Board of Directors of WestEd, the Committee on Grand Challenges in International Development for the National Academies of Science, and the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation’s Education and Human Resources Directorate.
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About Stanford Graduate School of Education: Stanford Graduate School of Education is dedicated to solving education’s greatest challenges.
Morgan Lopes
CTO of New Story Charity
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About New Story Charity: New Story Charity are crowdfunding life-changing homes for families around the world.
Nir Goshen
Chief Technology Officer of Smart Alec
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About Smart Alec: Smart Alec brings the top 4% of tutors to your door for k-12 academic help and test prep.
Eric Oemig
Chairman and CTO of Boom Learning
While serving in the Washington State Senate, Senator Oemig was the Vice Chairman of the Education Committee, served on the Quality Education Council, and Oemig was a key leader in passing landmark education reform in the state in 2009. Before joining the Senate, Senator Oemig was a Performance Manager at Microsoft, ensuring teams shipped quality, useful products. He served on the boards of First Robotics Washington and Technically Learning (now part of Code.org) helping to ignite passion in math, science and engineering for school kids.
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About Boom Learning: The company is known for Boom Cards, self-grading learning games. Educators can make their own or choose from over 400,000 “decks” developed by experienced educators and specialists. Boom Learning is also a platform that supercharges a teacher’s effectiveness by providing instant feedback, personalized assignments, and detailed reports.
Jack Kustanowitz
CTO of Citelighter
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About BusWhere, Citelighter, MountainPass Technology: Citelighter is a virtual highlighter that enables users to find and capture unique facts online and automatically generate citations.
Brian Marks
Co-Founder & CTO of trinket
Founder & CTO at Trinket
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About trinket: Trinket is the easiest way to make your class website interactive.
Binu Thayamkery
Co-founder & CTO of Nepris
Binu is a seasoned software professional who is passionate about technology, entrepreneurship and agile practices. Prior to co-founding Nepris, he held software architecture and management positions at several medium to large enterprises. A believer of life long learning, and Agile/Lean way of building software, he has a proven track record of building high performing software development teams. Binu has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Engineering from India and a Masters in Computer Science from Colorado State University.
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About Nepris: Nepris connects educators and learners with a network of industry professionals, virtually.
Santi Herrero Bajo
Co-Founder & CTO of EdPuzzle
Santiago Bajo is Co-Founder & CTO at EdPuzzle.
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About EdPuzzle: EdPuzzle is a video-editing tool with analytics for classroom.
Jing Chang
CTO of ITutorGroup
Mr. Jing Chang is the chief technology officer at TutorGroup. In this role, he is responsible for developing the overall technology vision, establishing the infrastructure that supports the TutorGroup platform and driving technical innovation. In addition, Mr. Chang oversees its engineering organizations, drives engineering initiatives and fosters collaboration. In recent years, Mr. Chang designed and developed key e-learning products, including a video conferencing platform, and mobile products for TutorGroup. Mr. Chang brings over 20 years of enterprise software development experience from the U.S., and a track record of delivering innovation and clear customer focus. Prior to joining TutorGroup, Mr. Chang held various leadership positions at Saba Software, IBM, GL Trade Group, and Comcast. Included amongst Mr. Chang’s broad range of responsibilities whilst at these organizations, he managed Saba’s mobile deliverables and multi-time zone teams; provided the technical leadership for building big data analytics and digital marketing applications at IBM; designed and developed web-based real-time margin trading systems for GL Trade Group; and designed / developed service-provisioning systems to support Comcast HSD (High Speed Data) subscribers. Mr. Chang holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Villanova University.
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About ITutorGroup: ITutorGroup provides individualized and personalized learning experiences to students and business professionals.
Brandt Redd
Chief Information Officer/CTO of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
As Chief Information Officer / CTO for Smarter Balanced, Brandt Redd ensures that the consortium is supported by a robust information and technology infrastructure. Redd previously served as Senior Technology Officer for education programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Redd has three decades of experience in the information technology sector. He co-founded Folio Corporation, an innovator in electronic publishing software, and Agilix Labs, a developer of learning solutions. In a diverse career, he has served as a software engineer, project manager, database administrator, chief scientist, and chief technology officer for companies like Ancestry.com. Redd received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA from Brigham Young University.
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About Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium: Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is a state-led consortium that develops next-generation assessments.
James Wrubel
CTO of Think Through Learning
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About Think Through Learning: Think Through Learning is an adaptive online math remediation integrated with live, real-time tutoring from certified U.S. math teachers.
Jonathan Elliott
CTO of PikMyKid
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About PikMyKid: PikMyKid is a school safety platform providing dismissal automation, panic button, parent engagement & traffic solutions for schools.
Peter Bell
Founder/CTO of CTO Connection
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About CTO Connection, CTO School: Engineering leader? Connect with and learn from your peers!
Yi Zhang
CTO, Co-Founder & Chair of the Board of Rulai
Yi Zhang is a tenured Professor in University of California Santa Cruz and CTO/co-founder of Rulai. Professor Zhang has 20 years of research experience in AI. She has received various awards, including ACM SIGIR Best Paper Award, National Science Foundation Faculty Career Award, Google Research Award, Microsoft Research Award, and IBM Research Fellowship. She has served as program co-chair, area chair and PC member for various top international conferences in. She has served as a consultant or a technical adviser for several companies (Alibaba, Toyota, HP, etc.) and startups. She received her Ph.D. from School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
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About Rulai: Rulai provides enterprise level total solution for AI virtual assistants. Rulai enables Business users take control of the VxA.
Michael Kong
Co-Founder and CTO of GiveCampus
Mike was a long-time engineer at Facebook, where he was responsible for making sure the world’s most-used social network was up and running.
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About GiveCampus: GiveCampus is a social fundraising and engagement platform for educational institutions.
Jesus Marco del Carmen
CTO and Co-Founder of GradJoy
Marco del Carmen co-founded GradJoy and serves as its CTO.
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About GradJoy: GradJoy manages your student loans — helping you save money and be debt-free faster.
Alvaro Sabido
Co-Founder & CTO of Caribu
Alvaro Sabido is CTO and Co-Founder at Caribu.
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About Caribu: Caribu is a family interactive video-calling platform that provides an engaging communication experience integrating books and activities.
Alain Fontaine
Co-founder & CTO of Clutch Prep
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About Clutch Prep: Clutch Prep is the best way to actually learn Video guides that follow your college textbook.
Jeff Silverman
Co-Founder, CTO of StudySoup
Jeff Silverman is the CTO, and co-founder of StudySoup. Jeff graduated from UC Santa Barbara with his masters degree in computer science. He was then confronted with a once in a life time opportunity to help solve some of the major problems with education – so he built StudySoup. Before starting his work on StudySoup, Jeff worked as an engineer at Citrix Online. He might not admit it, but he’s one of the nation.s top Ultimate Frisbee players – and has brought home many wins for the UCSB Black Tide and the SB Condors.
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About StudySoup: StudySoup is an exchange where students can upload or download class notes.
Justin Pincar
Founder & CTO of Achievable
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About Achievable, Unety: Achievable provide better way to study for the FINRA Series 7.
Jonathan Kirst
Co-Founder and CTO of BridgeCare
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About BridgeCare, MetaBright: BridgeCare is a white-label child care data and community management platform.
Farnaz Ronaghi
CTO & Co-Founder of NovoEd
Farnaz Ronaghi is cofounder and CTO at NovoEd. She received her Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology from Stanford University in 2016 with a thesis on collaborative learning at scale.
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About NovoEd: NovoEd’s collaborative learning platform enables organizations to design and deliver experiential learning that drives business performance.
Alexander Slaughter
Founder & CTO of Notebowl
Alex is the Chief Technical Officer for NoteBowl Inc.,
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About Arizona State University, Notebowl: NoteBowl is a social learning platform for higher education that puts courses and the campus community into one place.
Susan Beaudry Blinn
Founder & CTO of Tinyhood
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About Tinyhood: Tinyhood offers online courses, one-on-one consultations, and moderated communities.
Slawomir Lisznianski
Founder & CTO of PushCoin
Slawomir Lisznianski is CTO and Founder of PushCoin. Before founding PushCoin, Slawomir a self-taught IT wiz, designed and implemented secure, scalable financial systems. He worked directly with Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel Investment Group and the founder of Chopper Trading, both successful Chicago trading firms. His roles at Citadel and Chopper have been instrumental in creating profitable trading strategies. Slawomir appeared numerous times on behalf of Chopper at Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley talking about technology, security and algorithms.
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About PushCoin: PushCoin is a digital wallet for students and payments hub for K-12 public and private schools.
Srinivas Mandyam
Founder and CTO of Tynker
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About Tynker: Tynker is a creative computing platform that teaches kids programming skills in a fun, intuitive, and imaginative way.
Ryan Haynes
Co-founder & CTO of Osmosis
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About Osmosis: Osmosis empowers the clinicians and caregivers with the best learning experience.
Shilpa Dalmia
Founder & CTO of ActivityHero
Shilpa Dalmia is the Founder & CTO at ActivityHero.
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About ActivityHero: ActivityHero is a marketplace for kids camps and classes. Families can find in-person, online or on-demand activities for their kids.
Reilly Davis
Co-Founder & CTO of PeopleGrove
Reilly Davis is a Co-Founder and CTO at PeopleGrove.
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About PeopleGrove: Connect every student and professional with the mentors, advisers and network needed to realize their full potential.
David Dawson
CTO of eWebinar
Fractional CTO – As a startup founder we all feel stretched thin… I provide my time to startups that feel they need help from a senior technology leader. Prior to this I’ve built blockchain tech, scalable XBOX music services, search technology as well as designed the processes to manage the teams building themas CTO and co-founder of 2 startups over the last 4 years and before as Director at Microsoft over product management and development where I spent 15 years.
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About eWebinar: eWebinar turns any video into an interactive, automated webinar.
Michael Gorham
CTO – Founder of ConexED
Multidisciplinary software architect with over 20 years experience. Contributor to various open source projects. Background as development manager at eCollege, engineering manager at Consumer Review, high-level database and software architecture consulting.
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About ConexED: An Academic Communication System that enables students to get immediate face-to-face help.
Ilya Osipov
Founder, President, CTO of WOWCube® System (CubiOs Inc.)
Ilya Osipov (Russian: Илья Викторович Осипов) An entrepreneur with 18 years experience in web-based and mobile applications. Expert in gamification, HCI, and TUI. I participated in various projects as a founder, investor, mentor and manager. Author of 17 scientific articles: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8017-8153 https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=56622574600 Founder of WOWCube.com, Numbuster, NN.RU, nnov.org, FedSP.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_V_Osipov
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About i2istudy INC., NN.ru, Numbuster Ltd, WOWCube® System (CubiOs Inc.): WOWCube system is a puzzle cube with tangible interface where virtual gameplay is controlled by physically tilting, twisting shaking.
John Ackerlund
Chief Technology Officer & VP of Systems Development of Skyward
John Ackerlund is serves as a Chief Technology Officer at Skyward, Inc.
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About Skyward: A better SIS and ERP experience for school districts and municipalities.
Andrew Jennings
CTO of Prenda
Andrew Jennings is the CTO at Prenda.
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About Barcoders, Prenda: Prenda is an ed-tech company with the vision of helping young people learn technology in a fun, informal settings.
