Resume | CV

Bradley J. Rhodes

Researcher, Inventor

https://www.bradleyrhodes.com/ 510-735-7669

Experienced research scientist and technical lead with a demonstrated history tackling difficult technical problems that require multi-disciplinary solutions. Strong engineering professional skilled in Computer Science, Mobile and Wearable Computing, UX/UI design, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning. Publications in premier conferences and journals, and inventor on 45 issued patents.

Skills
  • Wearable computing
  • Ubiquitous computing
  • Planning algorithms
  • Machine learning
  • Simulation & modeling
  • UX/UI design
Technical
  • System architecture
  • Data analysis
  • Experimental design
  • Parallel processing (Flume & Apache Beam)
  • C++
  • Python
Experience

Loon LLC (formerly X / Google X) Nov 2011 - Aug 2021

Tech Lead, Research Scientist

  • Designed and developed mission control and balloon simulation system, Loon's primary tool for launch planning, flight tracking, and balloon recovery.
  • Conceived and co-created planning algorithm that became the basis for all of Loon's long-term balloon navigation systems.
  • Led team effort to simulate and visualize customer experience under different business scenarios. Results led to a major strategic shift to focus on tropical latitudes.
  • Conceived and developed static metrics to quickly identify balloon maneuverability at a location. These metrics became the primary means of identifying potential service regions.
  • Conceived, designed and developed a novel system for generating tunable synthetic wind noise for use in balloon simulation. The resulting system became a key component of Loon's simulation architecture.
  • Took ownership of Loon's wind-mixer, a system for improving short-term wind forecasts using Gaussian process regression. Designed and devoped experimental framework to measure system accuracy, and developed changes that improved short-term forecasts by 24%.
  • Designed and led development of architecture for integrating real-time storm data into Loon's simulation and planning architecture.
  • Ten issued patents.

Google X Apr 2011 - Oct 2011

Tech Lead, UX designer, Research Scientist

  • Designed, prototyped and evaluated UI and UX elements for what eventually became Google Glass.
  • Designed and ran UX study examining the physical limits of comfortable gaze angle, resulting in recommendations that were incorporated into the final design.
  • Six issued patents.

Ricoh eWriter Solutions Apr 2010 - Mar 2011

Senior E-Paper Interface Architect, Team Lead, Manager

Ricoh Innovations California Research Center 2001 - 2010

Senior Research Scientist

Education

PhD, Media Arts and Sciences

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Media Lab)

Software Agents Group

Thesis: Just-In-Time Information Retrieval. Investigated the design of JITIR agents: software that suggests useful information based on a person's local context.
Thesis supervisor: Dr. Pattie Maes.

Master of Science, Media Arts and Sciences

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Media Lab)

Software Agents Group

Thesis: PHISH-Nets: Planning Heuristically In Situated Hybrid Networks. Presented a behavior-selection algorithm for autonomous 3D graphical robots in noisy environments.
Thesis supervisor: Dr. Pattie Maes.

Bachelor of Science, Electrical Eng. & Computer Science

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Thesis: Doing the Right Thing Even Better. Evaluated and enhanced the Agent Network Architecture for behavior selection in autonomous robots.
Thesis Supervisors: Dr. Pattie Maes and Dr. Marvin Minsky.