Education
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Computer Science, Southern Methodist University (SMU), 2014
- Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), 2007
- M.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), 2002
- B.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), 2002
Biography
Dr. Clark began his career in the US Navy as a Nuclear Electrician, where he maintained the electrical systems for Naval Nuclear Power Plant on the Nimitz Aircraft Carrier (CVN-68). After his honorable discharge from the Navy Dr. Clark pursued his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). His Ph.D dissertation (Simulation and Development of Nanoscale Deposition Techniques Using Kinetic Monte Carlo) focused on high performance nanoscale modeling and simulation of growth kinetics for Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) of exotic materials such as Si/GaN heterogeneous super lattice structures. Dr. Clark currently serves as Deputy Director of Research at SMU Guildhall, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at SMU as well as CTO of BALANCED Media | Technology. He has over 20 years of experience with a background in finding solutions to large-scale problems by combining several areas of study, such as gaming, systems biology, distributed computing, and artificial intelligence/machine learning.
While serving as CTO, Dr. Clark has led two companies in the development of technology platforms centered around simulation and distributed ML. His first company developed a real-time simulation engine that allowed for 3rd party content to be integrated and simulated in an on-line 3D collaborative environment. He led this company through a $12MM Series A, B funding rounds and an acquisition to a large international game development company over a 24-month period. As CTO of BALANCED, he has lead the development of the patented HEWMEN platform, which provides a single platform that integrates data, compute and crowd, enabling crowd sourced machine learning over an intelligent data and machine learning infrastructure. He has raised almost $30MM in research, seed, and series funding from government and private entities. He has led multiple Advanced DoD R&D projects from concept to commercialization and lead a team to a $2.5MM XPRIZE Grand Prize win. Dr. Clark’s innovations in human-in-the-loop machine learning techniques have led to numerous publications, patents and invitations to speak at top conferences around the world. He also won the Emerging CTO, Edge Computing Grand Challenge and Inventor of the Year from TechTitans and Texas State Bar. His background and experience shows his passion for transitioning academic research to commercial applications. Simultaneously housing a research lab at SMU, Human and Machine Intelligence (HuMIn) Lab at SMU, as well as development team at BALANCED working towards the same goal of creating the platform, algorithms and interfaces to enable the collaboration of human and machines together.
Honors and Awards
- 2022 Emerging CTO, TechTitans
- 2021 Edge Computing Grand Challenge, $20,000, TechTitans
- 2021 Inventor of Year, Texas State Bar
- 2019 Technology Inventor of Year, TechTitans
- 2019 XPRIZE Grand Prize, $1,500,000, XPRIZE
- 2019 XPRIZE Achievement Prize, $1,000,000 XPRIZE
- 2019 Communities Competition Qualifier, $125,000, XPRIZE
- 2018 XPRIZE Finalist, $100,000, XPRIZE