![]() He did a lot of work in Chinese, despite not speaking the language. Ronjon spent over six years at Motorola, and served as a Vice President. His work on Lexicus landed him on the cover of Fortune Magazine, and shortly after, Lexicus was acquired by Motorola in the early 1990s. At the time, there were only two companies in the world who were working on cursive handwriting recognition. Ronjon invested a mere $500 and managed to get a contract with Apple to build a prototype. The idea was that this predecessor to tablets would replace paper, though interestingly enough, no one was really working on the handwriting recognition part” observed the founder in an interview with The Invested Investor podcast. “At the time, people were building what they called PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), like the Apple Newton and PalmPilot. Lexicus was built by Ronjon and a colleague based on their predictions for the use of handwriting recognition. The R42 president was finishing his postdoctoral work and having difficulties finding a job, so he decided to give himself a job by starting his own company. In the late 80’s the cold war was coming to an end, and actually this had a ripple effect in the engineering job market. As the president of R42, he is an advocate of the interdisciplinary roles of the AI field, having experienced the great advantage of collective work in the entrepreneurial world.įirst-time entrepreneur and Fortune Magazine cover When Ronjon went to MIT, in 1989, and he was working on a handwriting recognition software for bank checks, his research brought him to the Stanford Psychology department, where he worked collectively with mathematicians, engineers, linguists, and physicists trying to figure out a mathematical model of the brain. in engineering at Cambridge at Stanford, he was a Harkness Fellow and at MIT, he received a Master of Science. Ronjon graduated 1st class honors in Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham received his Ph.D. ![]() His unique story into the entrepreneurial world has a tight relation with academia: Dr. He was awarded the IET Mountbatten Medal at the Royal Institution for contributions to smartphones, and the $1m Verizon Powerful Answers Prize for Bounce Imaging where is Chairman. ![]() He is a founder/advisor/board member/investor of some 70 start-ups. Ronjon’s companies have been sold to Apple, BlackBerry, and Motorola, and he is a Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute Interdisciplinary Fellow, where he teaches AI and Healthcare Venture Capital. Perusing his LinkedIn profile highlights many of his inventions, from the first laptop with speech recognition built-in (with Apricot, 1984) and the first selling cursive handwriting recognition system (with Lexicus, 1991) to the first speech and handwriting recognition phones (with Motorola, 1995), the first mobile app stores (with Cellmania, 1999) and the list goes on. He built his first speech recognition system as an undergraduate at Birmingham University in 1983. ![]() He has been working on neural networks – what is now known as deep learning – at Cambridge, MIT and Stanford for the last 30 years. ![]() He has been a pioneer of smartphones and the ‘app stores’ they depend on. Hailing from the UK, and based in Palo Alto, Ronjon indeed followed his dream and built things a la Star Trek. and UK-based group committed to invent, invest and inform about AI and Biotech. He is the founder and president of R42 Institute, a U.S. Ronjon Nag on why he decided to become an engineer. “I wanted to build things that were in ‘Star Trek: The First-Generation’ TV series,” is what you would hear from Dr. ![]()
1 Comment
|
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |