Todd Bezenek specializes in improving the performance and usability of analog and digital computing systems at the hardware/software interface and has contributed to several textbooks and patents in the area. He was awarded two United States National Science Foundation research fellowships in engineering and mathematics, and the outstanding first-year graduate student research fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department in computer architecture, where he graduated in 20001.
Early in his career, Todd worked on database and statistical analysis systems and started a company that did software for researchers at North Dakota State University. He later worked on an operating system and hardware peripherals for the Data General Nova II computer, a research compiler at Michael Flynn's Stanford Electrical Engineering lab, and a research compiler that was the basis for the Strata Virtual Machine at the University of Wisconsin. The Strata compiler was a predecessor to the LLVM compiler done several years later at the University of Illinois and was considered too valuable to open-source, hence the need for LLVM. Todd left two engineering positions to enter the Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department as a fellowship researcher. One position was as the first computer scientist at a successful structural engineering software company; the other was a team of electrical engineering researchers at a company pioneering computerization in global agriculture.
Today, Mr. Bezenek is a strong proponent of open-source software and open hardware. He first came into contact with intellectual property while working as a performance architect at MIPS Technologies. The MIPS architecture was an important part along the path of RISC architectures, which led to MIPS-V. Other predecessors to RISC V were developed as part of the work on the groundbreaking textbook to which Todd contributed while in graduate school, "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach".
Today, Todd's company has contributed to the MIPS-V Consortium, which attempts to provide a shield against legal battles and the complexities associated with using commercial instruction set architecture (ISA) technology, and the Post-Industriual Insitute, which has been working for almost two decades to lift all boats using AI technology. He is interested in applying machine learning--the subject of his MS in electrical engineering in 1993--to knowledge acceleration and how to protect the public from improper use of the technology, either socially or economically.
