Chaki Ng, PhD

Chaki develops and ships tech products that serve millions, driven by user-centered design and the desire to solve the right problems.

Currently, he is working on Human-AI interaction design in the age of LLM and Generative AI. He also has been teaching these subjects at Brown + RISD Design Engineering program.

In the past 5 years, he has led as CTO + CPO at various startups. At Forge (next-gen trades workforce) he built various real-world AI technolgies (e.g., computer vision task datasets collected via AR glasses). At Hopps (on-demand expert help) he assembled experts of popular SaaS (from FB Ads to WordPress) to assist users live and paid-by-minute. At Luminopia (digital healthcare for children/teens) he built interactive video apps for mental wellness.

Earlier, he spent 8+ years at Viacom / Paramount, a Fortune 500 company, as the SVP Product: led MTV + VH1 brands to launch 15 industry-first video streaming apps on  in just 2 years (predecessors of Paramount+ today), with combined 500M+ video streams per year and helped 2.5X revenue. He also led redesigns of VMA and MTV News using data science to cement Top 10 spots among entertainment properties (e.g., 40M+ uniques). Chaki was later appointed by Viacom CXOs to be the first GM of Innovations and founded Viacom Lab and 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, with numerous collaborations including artists like William Corgan and organizations like Microsoft ) in less than 2 years.

Right out of college, Chaki co-founded Interactive Constructs, an edtech company that powered top products such as Read 180 for publishers like Scholastic + Harcourt via multi-million dollar licensing deals of its learning platform. ICI was profitable from Day 1 (grew 2x annually to $12M+ ARR with 65 employees) and was successfully acquired by Follett.

Chaki lived a parallel academic life: he did research on distributed systems (sensor / cloud / grid computing and mechanism design with multi-agents) at Harvard (PhD + SM in Computer Science, advised by Prof. Margo Seltzer and Prof. David Parkes) and augmented interfaces + RFID screens at MIT Media Lab. He also holds degrees from MIT Sloan (MBA product development) and Northeastern (BS in CS). He did all the degrees while he was working, bouncing between Boston and Cambridge.

Connect
 |  |  | firstname plus “fy” @ gmail

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