Tam Vu, the CEO and Founder of Earable® Neuroscience, was awarded the prestigious Google Faculty Research Awards in 2018 and 2014. The Google Faculty Research Awards are an annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics, such as quantum computing, machine learning, algorithms and theory, natural language processing, and more.
The Faculty Research Awards Program aims to recognize and support world-class faculty pursuing cutting-edge research in areas of mutual interest. According to the Google award website, “The intent of the Google Research Awards is to support cutting-edge research in computer science, engineering and related fields, including public policies, geographical maps, economics, and market algorithms.”
In 2018, the program received 910 proposals covering 40 countries and over 320 universities. After expert reviews and committee discussions, the committee decided to fund 158 projects. In 2018, the subject areas that received the most support were human-computer interaction, machine learning, machine perception, and systems.
Tam’s award encourages collaboration between Google and the Mobile and Networked System Lab in the Department of Computer Science. It also supports an ongoing project called "One Ring To Rule Them All," which aims to provide a ubiquitous solution for user identification and authentication via a novel communication technique known as Capacitive Touchscreen Communication.
This method takes advantage of the ubiquitous capacitive touchscreens found in today's electronic devices, such as laptops, phones, and so on, as a receiver for decoding identification and authentication information transmitted from custom-designed human wearable hardware tokens such as a ring or a watch. The goal is to combine all authentication tokens, such as credit cards, phone SIM cards, vehicle keys, and so on, into a single ring.
Before setting his sights on Earable, Tam assembled an impressive academic presence. Tam received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and WINLAB, Rutgers in 2013, and his Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Hanoi University of Science and Technology. Soon after, Tam became a distinguished researcher, cited scholar, and former associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Oxford. He accumulated impressive research achievements and began actively pushing his outcomes to practice with 25+ patents filed and forming startups to commercialize them.
During his time with the University of Colorado Boulder, Tam founded and directed the Mobile and Networked Systems (MNS) lab, where he and his team built systems to improve pediatric healthcare practices. The team designs and implements novel and practical cyber-physical systems to make physiological sensing (e.g. breathing volume measurement, brainwave signal monitoring, muscle movement recording, and sleep quality monitoring) less intrusive at a lower cost. They evaluate their systems on patients in in-hospital environments such as Colorado's Children's Hospital and CU School of Medicine to prove the medical meanings and technical advances of their novel devices and technologies.
In addition, he has also been working on other topics, including securing critical cyber-physical systems and providing seamless network connectivity for smart and connected cities.
In addition to the Google Faculty Research Awards in 2018 and 2014, Tam also won the prestigious 2020 Alfred F. Sloan Fellowship and NSF CAREER Award in 2019. For his accomplishments, Tam received comprehensive media coverage from CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
About Earable® Neuroscience
Earable® Neuroscience U.S. is a deep tech company delivering scalable, human-centric solutions that improve the everyday experience — from deep sleep to all-day focus.
Tam Vu is the Founder and CEO of Earable® , the company behind the FRENZ Brainband — the world's first consumer brainband that can measure and stimulate brain activity with clinical precision, so you can sleep more deeply, find sharper focus, and unlock your brain's true potential. It is the recipient of multiple scientific awards and holds 15 patents globally.
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