Clifton, Virginia, United States
Ian is the CEO and co-founder of SIMBA Chain. SIMBA Chain turns siloed data into a secure, connected, and verifiable data fabric. Its platform unifies fragmented systems into permissioned, intelligent networks powered by blockchain and AI. Designed as a repeatable platform, SIMBA scales quickly across use cases by configuring a dataset. It transforms inputs like PDFs into structured data, generates QR-accessible Product Passports, and tracks provenance over time, linking every update into a live, queryable record. The result is real-time, traceable data that can be shared securely without losing control.
Ian is the CEO and co-founder of SIMBA Chain. The SIMBA Suite offers a decentralized, security-first, patent-pending system for digital data and resource management. The system empowers clients to implement managed, secure, and verified digital resource ecosystems that improve data privacy, quality, and transparency. These ecosystems enable new operational and business capabilities by establishing secure and scalable systems for end-user identification and connectivity that facilitate efficient, verified, and auditable digital resource access and transmission. By leveraging the SIMBA Suite, companies can achieve a comprehensive view of their data landscape, both internally and externally.
I was the technical lead for SIMBA Chain Inc. before becoming CEO.
Ian was a Full Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame at the school of Computer Science Engineering and computational scientist at the Computing Research Center. Ian's research over the last 25 years has covered a broad range of distributed computing areas but he now specializes in Blockchain, machine learning, MANETs, open data access, Cloud computing, Web dashboards/APIs, big data applications, and distributed scientific workflow. Ian has worked with numerous application areas, including audio, astrophysics, engineering, bioinformatics, healthcare, property solutions, various military applications and ASIC chip design. Ian has published over 200 papers, has a h-index of 50 with > 12000 citations, has published 3 books, and has won the Naval Research Lab best paper award in 2010, 2011 and 2015. Ian acted as general chair for the WORKS Workflow workshop yearly at Supercomputing until 2022
I spend some time as a part time adjunct research associate professor at the CRC, Notre Dame, while building a relationship with the faculty and CRC to consider a more permanent full time role with the University.
I am president of Cleverfish Software, which is a Jacksonville C Corp that offers consultancy, development and research services in the Web, distributed computing and building dynamic energy management sectors. Cleverfish Software has worked on various contracts for the Naval Research Lab for over 20 years long, collaboration with NRL on various research projects the SRSS (Scalable Robust Self-organizing Sensors) group, being involved in various projects investigating middleware for use in mobile sensor networks within MANET ad-hoc wireless networks. Cleverfish has developed several systems including AgentJ, Proto-SD, INDI, WZeroRPC and the Newt workflow systems. For recognition of this work, we won three Naval Research Lab (NRL) best research paper (ALAN Berman) prizes in 2010, 2011 and 2015. Cleverfish also works with a local Jacksonville company, Fenetex, implementing a full Web stack ordering tool for their complex hurricane blind products.
Ian obtained his degree in Computing Science and a Ph.D. researching and implementing artificial-neural-network types for the determination of musical pitch, at Cardiff University. After his Ph.D, he joined the gravitational-wave group at Cardiff where he designed, procured and engineered the implementation of the data acquisition system for the GEO 600 gravitational wave detector (which is in operation today). He also wrote the Triana workflow system for GEO 600 and managed it thereafter. Ian's research over the last 27 years at Cardiff has covered a broad range of distributed computing areas but he now specializes in Blockchain, machine learning, MANETs, open data access, Cloud computing, Web dashboards/APIs, big data applications, and distributed scientific workflow. Ian has worked with numerous application areas, including audio, astrophysics, engineering, bioinformatics, healthcare, property solutions, various military applications and ASIC chip design. He has managed more than 15 research projects for Cardiff University, published >140 papers , 3 books, acted as guest editor for several special issues in journals, and acts as general chair the WORKS workshop on workflow yearly at supercomputing. . He won the Naval Research Lab (NRL)best research paper (ALAN Berman) prize in 2010, 2011 and 2015, which has been part of a 20-year long collaboration with the Naval Research Lab, working on numerous projects in mobile communications. Ian has an h-index of 43 and has over 9000 citations (google scholar ID JlqiAJkAAAAJ).
ASB Consulting is an agile technology consulting company, based in the Washington DC area, which focuses on delivering innovative software solutions to industry. ASB was founded in 2015 and since then has been working with companies like RealtyBid.com, Chronos Solutions, Intellicheck, and Elm Street Technology. The projects have varied from small scale projects, taking less than a month, to large scale engagements with long term support contracts. ASB offers a fresh approach to clients. Our team is comprised of Full Stack developers that are extremely comfortable working on both backend and front end technologies. Recently, we have used Java, .Net, Python (Django Rest Fraemwork) and NodeJS on the backend and AngularJS, EmberJS, Bootstrap and Semantic UI on the front end. We have also built a number of mobile native apps for iOS and Android and we’ve developed hybrid apps using the Ionic framework. I am the CTO of ASB and as such, I am responsible for lead Request for Information (RFI) and Sources Sought efforts, lead RFP responses and proposals, lead information gathering, specifications for Engagements and Level of Effort (LOE) estimates, providing detailed SOWs serializing projects down to the task level, along with the effort required, representing ASB in sales calls and function as lead Systems Architect and for client facing calls. I am also responsible as product owner for specifying sprints and user stories for the ASB development team, working with the scrum master for execution, and help to balance effort in order to mitigate any deviations in scope. I have successfully helped deliver more than 15 projects for ASB.