Chaki develops and ships products that serve millions, driven by good user-centered design and data insights. Currently, he is Head of Marketplace at startup Hopps.io, an on-demand service that matches vetted experts to users of popular SaaS tools / platforms. Previously, he was Chief Product Officer at Luminopia, Inc., a mobile and VR digital health startup. Earlier, he joined Viacom (Paramount) as the SVP Product: led MTV + VH1 and other brands to launch 15 industry-first D2C streaming apps on  in just 2 years (basically early versions Paramount+ today), with combined 500M+ video streams per year and helped increased revenues 2.5x. He also led redesigns of  VMA + MTV News with data science + growth hacking: both cementing their top spots among entertainment properties (e.g., 40M uniques). Chaki was then appointed by Viacom CXOs to be the first GM Innovations and founded two new business units, including Viacom NEXT - an VR + AR studio that shipped over 10 projects (on Steam + iOS stores, premiered at Sundance,  SXSW,  the Obama White House and won Grand Prix at Cannes Lions and Webby) in just over a year and a half. Right out of college, Chaki co-founded Interactive Constructs that powered top educational products such as Read 180 for publishers like Scholastic + Harcourt via multi-million dollar licensing of its learning platform. He started his career while in college as a co-op turned senior software engineer for Yoyodyne Entertainment, the first permission marketing company acquired by Yahoo! Chaki lived a parallel academic life, having worked on research focusing on 1) distributed systems (sensor networks + cloud / grid networks) + resource allocation (mechanism design and virtual currencies) at Harvard (PhD + SM in Computer Science, advised by Prof. Margo Seltzer and Prof. David Parkes) and 2) intelligent + augmented interfaces at MIT Media Lab. He also holds an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BS (Computer Science) from Northeastern. He still codes often to keep up with the latest and greatest.

Entrepreneur-in-Residence | Sponsor | Advisor recent/ex: MIT Martin Trust Center | Harvard iLab | NYC Media Lab | | MIT CSAIL | Columbia Tech Ventures | TribalScale | Spatial.is

Academic Publications and Projects
PhD Thesis: Online Mechanism and Virtual Currency Design

Speaker Decks

Some Talks on YouTube
Exploring Future Reality | Another One | AR in Action | Mayo Clinic Transform 
 
Some Press Coverage
AdWeek | Rolling Stone | VR Focus

Currently Learning: Deep Learning + Web3
Udacity AI Nanodegree + Machine Learning Engineer | MIT Social Network Data and Networks | Stanford d.School Bootcamp | Cooper Visual Interface Design
Fun Fact: I am lucky to have taken classes taught by many great academics including:
Tim Berners-Lee | Al Roth | Robert Merton | David Clark | Nancy Lynch | Hiroshi Iishi

Find me next at: TBD past events (* speaker): ACM SATIS Summer School on Advanced Topics in Systems | ODSC East | MIT Biz of Blockchain | _Underscore.vc Blockchain | MIT Bitcoin Expo| AI & Future of Work (MIT) | TakeOver VR/AR Panel* | AWE Expo | LDV Vision | Media Summit NYC* | AR in Action* | Exploring Future Reality*

Connect
    | |   | name plus “fy” @ gmail

Inspirations
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt