Bradley J. Rhodes

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.
• Developed tools, metrics and data visualizations for evaluating wind forecast error across all historic flight data.
• 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.
• Developed pipeline for cleaning, normalizing and publishing telemetry data from entire project history for use by external scientists.
• 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

• Developed core system for driving the E-Ink display of the Ricoh eQuill, a custom tablet designed for mobile business applications developed at Ricoh EWS.
• Became team lead and de-facto manager of the Device Software group in August 2010, and official manager in November 2010.

Ricoh Innovations California Research Center 2001 - 2010

Senior Research Scientist

• Conceived, designed, prototyped and evaluated new technology as member of the Shared Media Group at Ricoh Innovations CRC. Lead researcher and inventor on projects related to ubiquitous computing, fast update of E-Ink displays, secure peer-to-peer document sharing, zoomable user interfaces, paper-based computer interfaces, and workflow management.
• Led design of architecture for automatic discovery and execution of personal applications on scanners, copiers and other IO devices. Shepherded technology transfer to development teams at Ricoh Japan.
• Twenty-eight issued patents.

Kodak System Concept Center Jun 2000 - Feb 2001

Independent contractor

Completed prototypes of ARIA (Agent for Integrated Annotation and Retrieval), a combined image database and multimedia communications system. Helped conduct user tests and designed new version based on that evaluation.

MIT Media Lab Sep 1994 - Jun 2000

Research Assistant

Member of the Software Agents Group, working full-time on intelligence augmentation, wearable computing and synthetic characters research. Conceived, designed, implemented, evaluated and deployed projects in C, Java, Perl, Lisp, and hardware. Managed teams of up to three undergraduate research aids. One issued patent.

Stanford University Sep 1993 - Jun 1994

Research/Teaching Assistant

Projects included design of artificial intelligence algorithms for robotics, editing of book on expert systems, and research for the Stanford Computer Industry Research Project. Teaching Assistant for Stanford Expert Systems class, taught by Ed Feigenbaum.

Vicorp Sep 1991 - Sep 1993

System Software Engineer

Implemented fault-tolerant back-end systems for telephone calling card billing and advanced features. Systems were implemented in C for the Tandem fault-tolerant operating system, Guardian.

PhD, Media Arts and Sciences Jun 2000

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 Sep 1996

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 Jun 1992

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.

• Bradley J. Rhodes, Sergey Chemishkian, Edward L. Schwartz, Stephen Savitzky and Haixia Yu, "Automatic Discovery and Execution of Personal Applications from Shared IO Devices," in 2010 7th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2010, pp. 1-2. doi: 10.1109/CCNC.2010.5421693.
• Bradley Rhodes, "Using Physical Context for Just-in-Time Information Retrieval," in IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol 52, No. 8, August 2003 pp. 1011-1014.
• Bill Tomlinson, Bruce Blumberg, and Bradley Rhodes, "How is An Agent Like a Wolf?: Dominance and Submission in Multi-Agent Systems", in Proceedings of the International ICSC Symposium on Multi-Agents and Mobile Agents in Virtual Organizations and E-Commerce (MAMA'2000). December 11-13, 2000. Wollongong, Australia.
• Bradley Rhodes and Pattie Maes, "Just-in-time information retrieval agents," in IBM Systems Journal special issue on the MIT Media Laboratory, Vol 39, Nos. 3 and 4, 2000 pp. 685-704.
• Bradley J. Rhodes, "Margin Notes: Building a Contextually Aware Associative Memory," in The Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI '00), New Orleans, LA, January 9-12, 2000.
• Bradley J. Rhodes, Nelson Minar and Josh Weaver, "Wearable Computing Meets Ubiquitous Computing: Reaping the best of both worlds," in The Proceedings of The Third International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '99), San Francisco, CA, October 18-19 1999.
• Thad Starner, Bernt Schiele, Bradley J. Rhodes, Tony Jebara, Nuria Oliver, Joshua Weaver and Alex Pentland, "Augmented Realities Integrating User and Physical Models," in The Proceedings of The First International Workshop on Augmented Reality, Nov. 1998.
• Barry Crabtree and Bradley Rhodes, Wearable computing and the remembrance agent, in BT Technology Journal, 16(3), July 1998, pp. 118-124. doi: 10.1023/A:1009642301754.
• Bradley J. Rhodes, "WIMP Interface Considered Fatal," presented at the IEEE VRAIS 98 Workshop on Interfaces for Wearable Computers, March 15, 1998.
• Bradley Rhodes, "The Wearable Remembrance Agent: A system for augmented memory," in Personal Technologies Journal Special Issue on Wearable Computing, Personal Technologies (1997) 1:218-224.
• Bradley Rhodes, "The Wearable Remembrance Agent: a system for augmented memory ", in The Proceedings of The First International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '97), Cambridge, Mass, October 1997, pp. 123-128.
• Thad Starner, Steve Mann, Bradley Rhodes, Jeffrey Levine, Jennifer Healey, Dana Kirsch, Rosalind W. Picard, and Alex Pentland, "Augmented Reality Through Wearable Computing", in Presence, Special Issue on Augmented Reality, vol 6(4), Fall 1997.
• Bradley Rhodes and Thad Starner, "The Remembrance Agent: A continuously running automated information retrieval system," in The Proceedings of The First International Conference on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi Agent Technology (PAAM '96), London, UK, April 1996, pp. 487-495.
• Trevor Darrell, Bruce Blumberg, Sharon Daniel, Brad Rhodes, Pattie Maes, and Alex Pentland, "Alive: Dreams and illusions," in Visual Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics, July 1995.
• Bradley Rhodes, "The Storymaster: Automatic Creation of Acts of God for Dramatic Effect", presented at the AAAI-95 Spring Symposium on Plot and Character in Interactive Story Systems, Stanford University.

• Bernt Schiele, Thad Starner, Brad Rhodes, Brian Clarkson, and Alex Pentland, "Situation Aware Computing with Wearable Computers," In Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality, W. Barfield and T. Caudell (editors), Lawrence Erlbaum Press, 2001.

• Ken Gudan, John Barrus, Sergey Chemishkian, Guotong Fenc, Michael Gormish, Rich Kosoglow, Kurt Piersol, Bradley Rhodes, Edward Schwartz. Paper-Like Computing. Ricoh Technical Report No.35, 2009.
• Bradley Rhodes, "Pronomes in Behavior Nets". Technical Report #95-01, MIT Media Lab, Learning and Common Sense Section.

• Bradley Rhodes, Salvatore Candido, "Loon Stratospheric Sensor Data" [Data Set], Zenodo, 2021. Part of The Loon Collection, 2021.
• Bradley Rhodes, Jan Nelson, Byard Wenzel, Aneel Nazarath, Matthew Burnside, Alex Park, "The Remembrance Agent" [Software], 1996-2003.

• Bradley Rhodes, "Fast Updating of Bistable Displays for Pen Tracking and Page Flipping" (invited talk), IDW'09 The 16th International Display Workshops, Miyazaki, Japan, 2009.
• Bradley Rhodes and Kenji Mase, "Wearables in 2005" (invited paper), in IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 92-95, 2006.
• Bradley Rhodes, "Wearable Turbulence: Lessons from the living experiment" (invited tutorial), Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF'04), Rotterdam, Netherlands. 2004.
• Thad Starner, Bradley Rhodes, "Introduction to Wearable Computing" (invited tutorial), 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC'03), White Plains, New York, Oct 21, 2003.
• Thad Starner, Bradley Rhodes, "Introduction to Wearable Computing" (invited tutorial), ACM SIBMOBILE/USENIX First International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, San Francisco, May 5 2003.
• Thad Starner, Bradley Rhodes, "Introduction to Wearable Computing" (invited tutorial), 6th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC'02), Seattle, Oct 7, 2002.
• Bradley Rhodes, Thad Starner, "Introduction to Wearable Computing" (invited tutorial), International Conference on Pervasive Computing 2002, Zurich, Switzerland, Aug 28 2002.
• Bradley Rhodes, "Intelligence Augmentation" (guest lecture), Stanford Seminar on People Computers and Design (CS547), Stanford University, May 3 2002.
• Bradley Rhodes, "Intelligence Augmentation" (invited talk). 3rd International Spearman Seminar on Extending Intelligence, Sydney Australia, Nov 30 2001.
• Bradley Rhodes, "Wearable Technologies" (invited panelist), Gartner Group, Mastermind Panel: Future Technologies, Orlando Florida, Oct 8, 2001.

• B. Rhodes, S. Candido. "Systems and methods for simulating wind noise models." U.S. Patent No. 10,573,196, filed July 28, 2017, and issued February 25, 2020.
• K. Bonawitz, B. Rhodes, A. Treuille. "Methods and systems for determining when to launch vehicles into a fleet of autonomous vehicles." U.S. Patent No. 10,354,535, filed October 20, 2015, and issued July 16, 2019.
• S.J. Lee, B. Rhodes, I.C. Mendis, M.B. Braun. "Experience sharing for a registry event." U.S. Patent No. 10,083,468, filed December 21, 2015, and issued September 25, 2018.
• D. Phillips, M.E. McFarland, A. Mariotti, H. Yu, M. Griffin, B. Rhodes, S. Chemishkian, E. Schwartz, P. Case, S. Savitzky. "Distributed workflow-enabled system." U.S. Patent No. 9,734,465, filed June 9, 2008, and issued August 15, 2017.
• D. Piponi, B. Rhodes. "Methods and systems for determining altitudes for a vehicle to travel." U.S. Patent No. 9,651,382, filed September 15, 2014, and issued May 16, 2017.
• S.J. Lee, I.C. Mendis, M.B. Braun, T. Chi, B. Rhodes. "Experience sharing with commenting." U.S. Patent No. 9,367,864, filed March 19, 2015, and issued June 14, 2016.
• K. Piersol, K. Amemiya, B. Rhodes. "User interface with inbox mode and document mode for single input work flow routing." U.S. Patent No. 9,286,581, filed June 29, 2010, and issued March 15, 2016.
• S.J. Lee, B. Rhodes, I.C. Mendis, M.B. Braun. "Experience sharing for a registry event." U.S. Patent No. 9,245,288, filed July 19, 2012, and issued January 26, 2016.
• K. Bonawitz, B. Rhodes, A. Treuille. "Methods and systems for determining when to launch vehicles into a fleet of autonomous vehicles." U.S. Patent No. 9,195,938, filed December 27, 2012, and issued November 24, 2015.
• B. Rhodes, G. Feng, E. Schwartz. "Driver for page transitions in an electronic paper device." U.S. Patent No. 9,159,274, filed March 7, 2011, and issued October 13, 2015.
• B. Rhodes. "Maintaining DC balance in electronic paper displays using contrast correction." U.S. Patent No. 9,058,778, filed June 29, 2010, and issued June 16, 2015.
• B. Rhodes. "Dynamic creation of waveform palette." U.S. Patent No. 9,024,862, filed July 2, 2009, and issued May 5, 2015.
• S.J. Lee, I.C. Mendis, M.B. Braun, T. Chi, B. Rhodes. "Experience sharing with commenting." U.S. Patent No. 9,015,245, filed December 8, 2011, and issued April 21, 2015.
• M. Gormish, S. Savitzky, K. Ridout, K. Piersol, B. Rhodes, M. Boliek, G. Nudd. "Method and apparatus for recording associations with logs." U.S. Patent No. 8,996,483, filed March 28, 2007, and issued March 31, 2015.
• E. Teller, R. DeVaul, J. Weaver, C. Biffle, B. Rhodes. "Recovery of balloon materials." U.S. Patent No. 8,988,253, filed July 16, 2012, and issued March 24, 2015.
• R. DeVaul, E. Teller, C. Biffle, J. Weaver, B. Rhodes. "Combined balloon shipping container and deployment system." U.S. Patent No. 8,910,905, filed August 8, 2012, and issued December 16, 2014.
• K. Piersol, K. Amemiya, B. Rhodes, E. Schwartz, K. Gudan. "Power management based on combined user interface and sensor inputs." U.S. Patent No. 8,904,197, filed March 7, 2011, and issued December 2, 2014.
• Liu; Xu, S. Chemishkian, J. Graham, J. Barrus, B. Rhodes, K. Berkner, M. Griffin, J. Hull. "Methods for printing from mobile devices." U.S. Patent No. 8,902,454, filed October 14, 2009, and issued December 2, 2014.
• B. Rhodes, S. Savitzky, K. Piersol. "Secure peer-to-peer distribution of an updatable keyring." U.S. Patent No. 8,885,832, filed March 31, 2008, and issued November 11, 2014.
• K. Bonawitz, B. Rhodes, D. Piponi, A. Treuille. "Methods and systems for determining a cyclical fleet plan satisfying a recurring set of coverage requirements." U.S. Patent No. 8,880,326, filed February 20, 2013, and issued November 4, 2014.
• B. Rhodes, M.P. Johnson, S. Thrun, T. Starner. "Chord authentication via a multi-touch interface." U.S. Patent No. 8,873,147, filed December 8, 2011, and issued October 28, 2014.
• D. Piponi, B. Rhodes. "Methods and systems for determining altitudes for a vehicle to travel." U.S. Patent No. 8,862,403, filed December 28, 2012, and issued October 14, 2014.
• K. Bonawitz, B. Rhodes. "Methods and systems for determining fleet trajectories with phase-skipping to satisfy a sequence of coverage requirements." U.S. Patent No. 8,849,571, filed December 26, 2012, and issued September 30, 2014.
• M.E. McFarland, D. Phillips, A. Mariotti, H. Yu, M. Griffin, B. Rhodes, S. Chemishkian, E. Schwartz, P. Case, S. Savitzky, G. Wolff. "Workflow-enabled provider." U.S. Patent No. 8,838,760, filed June 9, 2008, and issued September 16, 2014.
• B. Rhodes, T. Starner, C. Biffle. "Methods and apparatus for electronic communication filtering." U.S. Patent No. 8,838,708, filed August 18, 2011, and issued September 16, 2014.
• B. Rhodes, K. Piersol. "Generating strokes in real-time on an electronic paper display." U.S. Patent No. 8,830,258, filed March 7, 2011, and issued September 9, 2014.
• C. Biffle, R. DeVaul, J. Weaver, E. Teller, B. Rhodes. "Thermal regulation of balloon payload using electronic ink." U.S. Patent No. 8,804,228, filed December 28, 2012, and issued August 12, 2014.
• B. Rhodes, S. Chemishkian, E. Schwartz, D. Phillips, M.E. McFarland, A. Mariotti , H. Yu, M. Griffin, S. Savitzky, G. Wolff, P. Case. "Workflow-enabled client." U.S. Patent No. 8,713,144, filed June 9, 2008, and issued April 29, 2014.
• B. Rhodes. "Page transitions on electronic paper displays." U.S. Patent No. 8,587,597, filed October 6, 2009, and issued November 19, 2013.
• G. Wolff, A. Elliott, J. Graham, B. Rhodes. "Associating pre-generated barcodes with temporal events." U.S. Patent No. 8,452,153, filed July 11, 2003, and issued May 28, 2013.
• S. Savitzky, B. Rhodes, J. Barrus, H. Kishi. "Techniques for facilitating annotations." U.S. Patent No. 8,380,866, filed March 20, 2009, and issued February 19, 2013.
• B. Rhodes, J. Barrus, G. Feng. "Independent pixel waveforms for updating electronic paper displays." U.S. Patent No. 8,355,018, filed March 31, 2008, and issued January 15, 2013.
• B. Rhodes. "Page transition on electronic paper display." U.S. Patent No. 8,237,733, filed March 31, 2009, and issued August 7, 2012.
• B. Rhodes, S. Chemishkian, E. Schwartz, M. McFarland, D. Phillips, A. Mariotti, H. Yu, M. Griffin, S. Savitzky, G. Wolff, P. Case. "Workflow manager for a distributed system." U.S. Patent No. 8,171,117, filed June 9, 2008, and issued May 1, 2012.
• S. Savitzky, S. Chemishkian, B. Rhodes. "Split delay-line oscillator for secure data transmission." U.S. Patent No. 8,072,284, filed March 30, 2009, and issued December 6, 2011.
• B. Rhodes, S. Savitzky, K. Piersol. "Secure pre-caching through local superdistribution and key exchange." U.S. Patent No. 8,046,328, filed March 30, 2007, and issued October 25, 2011.
• B. Rhodes, K. Piersol, G. Wolff. "Techniques for displaying information for collection hierarchies." U.S. Patent No. 7,911,465, filed March 30, 2007, and issued March 22, 2011.
• K. McCall, K. Piersol, J. Barrus, B. Rhodes, S. Savitzky. "Displaying a long sequence of images in a short amount of time." U.S. Patent No. 7,856,153, filed February 1, 2006, and issued December 21, 2010.
• J. Barrus, G. Wolff, A. Elliott, K. McCall, B. Rhodes, S. Savitzky. "Multimedia document sharing method and apparatus." U.S. Patent No. 7,739,583, filed March 31, 2003, and issued June 15, 2010.
• J. Barrus, G. Wolff, A. Elliott, K. McCall, B. Rhodes, S. Savitzky. "Method and apparatus for composing multimedia documents." U.S. Patent No. 7,703,002, filed March 31, 2003, and issued April 20, 2010.
• R. Nair, K. Piersol, B. Rhodes, A. Elliott, K. McCall, S. Savitzky. "Generating and displaying level-of-interest values." U.S. Patent No. 7,672,864, filed January 9, 2004, and issued March 2, 2010.
• J. Barrus, A. Elliott, K. Piersol, B. Rhodes, S. Savitzky. "Stamp sheets." U.S. Patent No. 7,546,528, filed December 20, 2004, and issued June 9, 2009.
• S. Savitzky, G. Wolff, B. Rhodes. "Document distribution and storage system." U.S. Patent No. 7,451,236, filed February 26, 2002, and issued November 11, 2008.
• B. Rhodes. "Generating augmented notes and synchronizing notes and document portions based on timing information." U.S. Patent No. 7,415,667, filed January 31, 2003, and issued August 19, 2008.
• B. Rhodes, T. Starner, P. Maes, A. Pentland. "Method and apparatus for automated, context-dependent retrieval of information." U.S. Patent No. 6,236,768, filed May 1, 1998, and issued May 22, 2001.

• Program Committee Co-Chair, 9th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC'05), Osaka, Japan, Oct 18-21, 2005.
• Program Committee Member, 8th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC'04), Arlington, Virginia, Oct 31 - Nov 3, 2004.
• Program Committee Member, 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC'03), White Plains, New York, Oct 21-23, 2003.
• Tutorials and Workshops Chair, 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC'03), White Plains, New York, Oct 21-23, 2003.