Tim Oates is the co-founder and chief data scientist of Synaptiq, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, and a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). A machine learning researcher, he directs UMBC’s Cognition, Robotics, and Learning (CoRaL) Laboratory and studies how machines can learn meaning from raw sensor data and language.
Training at UMass Amherst and MIT
He earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science and electrical engineering in 1989, then a master’s degree and a PhD in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He then spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts (CoRaL Lab).
Research at UMBC’s CoRaL Lab
At UMBC he was appointed an Oros Family Professor of Computer Science to work on a project to improve healthcare in developing countries. His recent research has covered deep neural networks that remove noise from EEG signals for brain-machine interfaces, reinforcement learning that trains robots from video demonstrations, and methods for keeping deployed deep learning models accurate as their data changes (UMBC).
Working With Stephen Sklarew
He first worked with Stephen Sklarew at a Virginia company that collected business contact data, where Sklarew, then its chief technology officer, hired him to help make sense of its data. Sklarew turned to him again for an AI project, and the two founded Synaptiq in 2015 (GeekWire). The firm’s focus on computer vision grew out of his research and his connections as a university researcher, according to Oregon Business.