Becoming An Inventor

April 8, 2024

Update in April 29, 2025

2025 Update!

I got a job at Mapbox where my unique AWS spatial big data skillset fits perfectly! I wanted to take a minute to talk a little about the history of this patent as well. Starting with my gratitude to collaborators.

The patents are titled "Control of autonomous mobile robots". I have to express my gratitude to Shipra Arora for putting a lot of work into the design that helped product managers and customers understand this feature. Patents for algorithms alone are rarely accepted nowadays.

I also owe a lot to Brandon Rohrer for helping to improve this feature immensely, taking ownership should I could keep growing, and better communicating its strengths and weaknesses to stakeholders.

And I thank Steve Baron and the iRobot legal team for having the experience to recognize and fulfill the patent opportunity.

And to the rest of my team at iRobot for giving me direction and space to explore and build and realize this feature. Security, Cloud Ops, Mobile, and Robot teams were all involved to bring an idea and an algorithm to market.

Now that that's out of the way it's time to brag. While I may not be first on these patents (for good reason), I am still a trailblazer and an inventor. A great deal of privacy and anonymization work was done before this feature was even conceived by myself and others. A great deal of exploration and experimentation was done by myself before any of the data was readily accessible. I scrubbed and standardized for months and built data pipelines with ephemeral PostGIS-enabled database clusters. I implemented the first "algorithm" on Postgres and on Athena. Later, I upgraded the spatial ingest to Well-Known Text in our datalake for Athena compatibility and eventually did a PoC with Shapely to turn this into a near real time pipeline which I mentored a coworker through its implementation. I feel confident that without my contributions, this feature may not exist or may have only existed years later.

Patents related to my work on "keep out zone" recommendation algorithms and data pipelines:

Original Post

When I was a little kid, people would ask me, "Where do you want to go to school?" And I would say, "MIT!"

When I was a little kid, people would ask me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And I would say, "An Inventor!"

When I went to college, people ask "What do you want to learn about?" And I would say, "Artificial Intelligence!"

I went to a state school. I graduated and became a consultant. I did a pretty good job for awhile. But as more time passed and I found myself wanting more. For better or worse, I became obsessed with AI. I studied for the GRE to go to grad school. I took online courses. I did tons of tutorials and built beginner robotics kits. I applied to lots of schools and lots of jobs and got lots of rejections. Eventually, I built a project called the "Build Butler" and one day, I realized I had been using an iRobot Create 2 for months and thought, "I wonder if they need my skills?"

I applied for a data engineer position, passed a take home assignment, and landed the job. I took a giant risk moving from DC to Boston to work for iRobot where I would work side by side with MIT, Caltech, and CMU grads and other advanced degree holders. It turns out, years of practical software engineering skills are very useful to a company full of researchers, scientists, and academics!

At iRobot, we built a world-class petabyte-scale data platform at a fraction of the cost of off-the-shelf options. I witnessed multiple female-led teams grow and change the way a company looked at data. I built “Coolio, the Cold Brew Penguin” Slackbot to tell us when we were out of coffee before making the long trek of disappointment and had a blast totally over-engineering a mundane problem. And I built data pipelines for mapping and spatial data and wrote algorithm to power the “recommended keep out zone” feature which was patented, making me an inventor!

There is a lot more to this story. But for right now, I'll just say, "I'm open for work."

Me in 2017 starting my AI & robotics obsession

Me in 2024 holding my patent plaque from iRobot

Did you find this useful?

Tell Us What You Thought

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse