Dr. Ronjon Nag is an inventor, entrepreneur and a Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute Interdisciplinary Fellow based at the Stanford Center for Language and Information (CSLI). He is founder of the R42 Institute which invents, informs and invests. He is a founder and advisor/board member of multiple start-ups. His companies have been sold to Apple, BlackBerry, and Motorola. He has been awarded the Mountbatten Medal in the Royal Institution by the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and has been winner (Bounce Imaging-Chairman) of the $1m Verizon Powerful Answers Award.
He has been a pioneer of smartphones and the ‘app stores’ they depend on. He has worked on neural networks, touch screens, mobile search, voice recognition, text prediction and handwriting recognition.
Major achievements:
• Invented new systems for interacting with mobile devices – predictive text, handwriting, and speech recognition resulting in a billion installs
• Invented app stores in 2000, resulting in billions of downloads
Firsts:
• First laptop with speech recognition built-in (with Apricot, 1984)
• First selling cursive handwriting recognition (with Lexicus, 1991)
• First speech recognition phones (with Lexicus/Motorola, 1996)
• First large-vocabulary Chinese speech recognition (with Lexicus/Motorola, 1996)
• First Chinese predictive text system on a phone (Lexicus/Motorola, 1997)
• First predictive text systems in 40 languages on Motorola phones, (Lexicus/Motorola, 1997)
• First touch screen mobile phone with handwriting recognition (Lexicus/Motorola, 1999)
• First combined mobile search engine and directory (with Cellmania, 2000)
• First private label downloadable operator billable apps store (Cellmania, 2000)
• First BlackBerry Operator Billing apps store (Cellmania,2010)
• First Neural Network Artificial Intelligence System in the Cloud (Ersatz Labs, 2014)
• First Throwable 360 Ball Camera (Bounce Imaging, 2015)
• First Android powered smart light switch (Brightswitch 2017)
• First non-calibrated continuous blood pressure watch (GTCardio 2019)
