Zach Buckner is an engineer and entrepreneur in Charlottesville VA, with an array of interests in freight, operations research, machine learning, text analytics, simulation, optimization, and computer architecture.  Zach is the Founder and CEO of Retail Relay, the Vice President of Technology for Elder Research, Inc., and the inventor of a next-generation industrial sensor line at Visi-Trak Sensors, LLC.

Zach has a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia, and is named as an inventor on an array of pending and awarded US and international patents, including two that are currently being licensed through the University of Virginia's Patent Foundation.  In addition, he has won research and design awards from the University of Virginia and the University of California at Berkeley, with one of his designs being named one of the '40 Best Products of 2000' by Control Engineering Magazine.

1/6/2010 - Guest presenter for Trip Davis's Financing New Ventures class at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.

9/21/2009 - Guest presenter for two sections of Darden's Operations Strategy course.

9/1/2009 - Live case on Retail Relay for Darden's Marketing Intelligence class.  Relay is the focus of 12 Marketing Intelligence student projects this year.

3/24/2009 - Panelist for the 2009 Virginia Specialty Food Educational Conference at the Boar's Head in Charlottesville, VA. The Panel is called Innovative Marketing: Catering to "Buy Local" Consumers

11/13/2008 - Invited Keynote Presenter at SAS Forum México 2008 in Mexico City. Due to scheduling conflict, colleague Antonia de Medinaceli presented the Field Guide to Text Mining talk I developed for M2008. More information here

10/29/2008 - Presented Field Guide to Text Mining: An overview of the people, tools, and research frontiers that are unlocking the predictive power of text at SAS's M2008 conference in Las Vegas. More information about the talk is available here.

- "Method and System for Enhanced Resolution, Automatically-Calibrated Position Sensor" was issued today as US7,460,979.

9/16/2008 - Text mining tutorial, as part of Elder Research's Annual 2-Day course entitled Tools for Discovering Patterns in Data: A Survey of Modern Data Mining Algorithms. More information is available .

6/6/2008 - An article about Visi-Trak Sensors is featured in the current issue of Industrial Embedded Systems Magazine. [link]

5/7/2008 - Coinvented and filed a recent provisional patent covering an Internet advertising scheme that harnesses data mining and predictive modeling while preserving end-users' privacy. This patent, entitled Method and System for Targeted Advertising was assigned to PDI Solutions, LLC., a Dallas-based Internet media and advertising company.

2/1/2008 - Coinvented and filed a recent provisional patent covering a novel game interface for trading securities and currencies. This patent, entitled Network Computer Game Linked To Real-Time Financial Data was assigned to Financial Data Games, LLC., an Internet gaming spinout.

5/2/2007 - Completed and filed a provisional patent in the area of next-generation user interfaces.  This valuable intellectual property was developed for Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc. during a consulting project through Elder Research, Inc.

2/8/2007 - The patent Method, Apparatus and Computer Program Product of Aliasing Discriminator for Encoder Interfaces, describing an invention made by Zach Buckner for Visi-Trak Worldwide, was filed for in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Europe.  The PCT version of this patent is available online. [pdf]

12/11/2006 - The publication titled Antialiasing Encoder Interface with Sub-Nyquist Sampling was published in the December 2006 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.  This publication was authored by Zach Buckner from Design Insights; Michael Reed, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia; and James H. Aylor, Louis T. Rader Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. A copy of this publication is available online. [pdf] [link].