Zach Buckner is an entrepreneur with over 10 years of management and product development experience.  Zach has a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia, five patents, and has won research and design awards from the University of Virginia and the University of California at Berkeley.  In addition, one of his designs was named one of the '40 Best Products of 2000' by Control Engineering Magazine.

Zach offers management and product development consulting services to businesses of all sizes, and has helped businesses launch successful new products in the areas of computer software, computer hardware, industrial controls, sensors, and consumer products.

Zach is currently the Vice President of Technology for Elder Research, Inc., the inventor of a next-generation industrial sensor line at Visi-Trak Sensors, LLC, and the Founder and CEO of Retail Relay.

12/2/2008 - My "Method and System for Enhanced Resolution, Automatically-Calibrated Position Sensor" was issued today as US7,460,979.

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

5/7/2008 - I coinvented, wrote, 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 - Zach Buckner coinvented, wrote, 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 - Zach Buckner has 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].

3/24/2009 - Invited 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 Mˇxico 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.

9/16/2008 - Presented a 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 .

Below are pieces of the media's coverage surrounding the launch and growth of Retail Relay. For more Retail Relay press, click here.

We're happy to report that news of Retail Relay's public launch was aired 5 times today, on both CBS19 News and on ABC16 News. Footage from the 5:30pm story is included below.

We are pleased to announce that Retail Relay was covered on the front page of today's edition of the Daily Progress, our region's largest daily newspaper. A copy of the article is available here.

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

Resume [html] [pdf]

Method and System for Targeted Advertising. US Provisional Patent No. 61/051,104, filed on 5/6/2008.

Network Computer Game Linked To Real-Time Financial Data. US Provisional Patent expected to convert to US Application in January of 2009.

Ambient Software Integration System. US Provisional Patent expected to convert to US Application in April of 2007.

Method, Apparatus and Computer Program Product of Aliasing Discriminator for Encoder Interfaces.  PCT Patent W02006020963, February 23 2006  [pdf]

Method and System for Enhanced Resolution, Automatically-Calibrated Position Sensor.  PCT Patent W02005053146, June 9 2005  [pdf]

Antialiasing Encoder Interface with Sub-Nyquist Sampling.  Published in the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, December 2006. [pdf]

Enhanced Resolution Quadrature Encoder Interface.  Masters Thesis, May 2004 [html] [pdf]

A Programming Language for the Lleta Distributed Shared Memory Platform
Undergraduate Thesis, July 2002 [html] [pdf]

"Zach is a true multi-dimensional thinker - able to take complex problems with historically difficult solutions and break through to novel solutions. He is a great person to work with and brings a special blend of enthusiasm and maturity to hard areas. Working with Zach is one of the best investments our organization has made."

-Tim Estes, Founder and CEO of Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc.

"Zach has a genius for seeing product opportunities and understanding markets. In the past year, Zach has helped Coral Networks and my team at MIT build out a global technology architecture. Due to Zach"s innovative and focused approach to opportunity development, we"ve succeeded in creating a product which has been a success with the Global Fortune 100 and investors."

-Charles Henderson, Founder of Coral Networks, Inc.

"In guiding our company, Zach has exhibited an exceptional combination of pragmatism, intelligence, vision, patience, resourcefulness and affability.  We can't stress enough how indebted we feel to him for his services.  He's more like  partner than a consultant, and he lets us focus on what we know how to do best."

-Randall Ray, Cofounder and President of Rockbridge Guitar Company

Lleta Tree Utilities

sphinxJava  - Java frontend for the SphinxII Speech Recognition Engine

Compiler Sniffer – Automatically summarizes a C compiler’s translation process.

I have a weblog with recent travel photos.

He Saw Cinders - a song written and recorded by llamarama, a band I play in occasionally.  This version of from our new album, which we're hoping to release soon.

Connections - another song off our new album.