Chaki designs and ships products from web and mobile to VR and AR. He has led both startups and large companies to deploy emerging technologies through his expertise in architecting executable roadmaps and human-centered design.

Currently, he is exploring Human-AI Interaction in the age of LLM and Generative AI - especially new UI / UX paradigms that need to be invented. He has been teaching these subjects at the Brown + RISD Design Engineering program.

In the past 5 years, he has led as CTO and CPO at various startups. At Forge (next-gen trades workforce), he built real-world AI technolgies, including computer vision supervisors using AR glasses. At Hopps (on-demand expert help), he assembled experts in popular SaaS platforms (from Facebook Ads to WordPress) to assist users live and paid by the minute. At Luminopia (digital healthcare for children and teens), he developed interactive video apps for mental wellness.

Earlier, he spent 8+ years at Viacom / Paramount, a Fortune 500 company, as the SVP Product: he led MTV + VH1 brands to launch 15 industry-first video streaming apps on  in just 2 years (predecessors of Paramount+ today), generating 500M+ video streams annually and helping to 2.5X the revenue. He also led redesigns of VMA and MTV News using data science, securing Top 10 positions among entertainment properties (achieving 40M+ unique visitors). Chaki was subsequently appointed by Viacom CXOs as the first GM of Innovations, where he founded Viacom Lab and Viacom NEXT - a VR + AR studio that shipped over 10 projects in less than 2 years. These projects were distributed on Steam and iOS stores, premiered at top venues like Sundance,  SXSW,  the Obama White House. The studio also won Grand Prix at Cannes Lions and a Webby award, and collaborated with notable artists like Billy Corgan and organizations such as Microsoft (volumetric capture). 

Right out of college, Chaki co-founded Interactive Constructs, an edtech company that powered top learning products such as Read 180 for publishers like Scholastic and Harcourt .The company secured multi-million dollar licensing deals for its learning management platform, Lycea. ICI was profitable from day one, growing 2x annually to reach $12M+ ARR with 65 employees and was successfully acquired by Follett (runs most of the US college bookstores).

Chaki pursued a parallel academic career, conducting research on distributed systems (sensor / cloud / grid computing, along with multi-agent protocol design using mechanism design) at Harvard, where he earned his PhD and SM in Computer Science. His doctoral work was advised by Prof. Margo Seltzer and Prof. David Parkes. He also did research on augmented interfaces and interactive RFID screens at MIT Media Lab, and holds an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BS (CS) from Northeastern. Chaki has co-authored over 10 peer-reviewed publications.

Academic Publications
Google Scholar List | PhD Dissertation

Portfolio / Projects
{Sample List --pictures soon}

Advisor | EIR | Sponsor recent/ex: HKDI (Hong Kong Design Institute) | Webby / IASAS | MIT Martin Trust Center | Harvard iLab |
MIT CSAIL | CMU Entertainment Tech Center | TribalScale | Spatial.is 


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

Some Fun Facts
I am luck to have taken classes by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web),
Al Roth, Robert Merton (Nobel Laureates) and many others.


Connect
    | |   | firstname plus “fy” @ gmail


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