BIOGRAPHY
Jon is founder and CEO of Tignis, a startup company that is working with hardware companies and fabs to bring advanced machine learning capabilities to process automation and control in the semiconductor manufacturing space. Jon is a deep technologist and experienced executive who has a long history of leading innovation in big data analytics and applied artificial intelligence and machine learning. His career began in the nineties where, as the lead engineer of MovieLens, he helped create the field of recommender systems as popularized by companies like Netflix and Amazon. In his prior leadership roles, he was Vice President and CTO of VMware as Cloud Management Business Unit, CTO of Mozy, and CTO of EMC’s Cloud Services division. Jon is an experienced entrepreneur, having founded three startup companies. Jon is a former tenured professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University, and his highly-cited academic research work was awarded the prestigious 2010 ACM Software System Award for contributions to the field of computer science. Jon holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, and a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Lewis and Clark College.