Bio
Zach Buckner is an inventor, engineer and entrepreneur in Charlottesville VA, with an array of interests in e-commerce, freight, machine learning, simulation, optimization, and computer architecture.
He is the Founder and CEO of Relay, the Founder of VCMentor.com, Founder of Data Mining Advisors, the Vice President of Technology for Elder Research, Inc., and the inventor of a next-generation industrial sensor line at Visi-Trak Sensors, LLC
Zach has a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia, and is named as an inventor on an array of pending and awarded US and international patents, including two that are currently being licensed through the University of Virginia's Patent Foundation. In addition, he has won research and design awards from the University of Virginia and the University of California at Berkeley, with one of his designs being named one of the '40 Best Products of 2000' by Control Engineering Magazine.
Media
Click here for an assortment of media related to Relay.
Publications
Antialiasing Encoder Interface with Sub-Nyquist Sampling. Published in the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, December 2006. [pdf]
Enhanced Resolution Quadrature Encoder Interface. Masters Thesis, May 2004. [html] [pdf]
An Optimization Technique for Paint Mixtures Class Conference Submission [pdf]
A Programming Language for the Lleta Distributed Shared Memory Platform. Undergraduate Thesis, July 2002.[html][pdf]
Patents
Method and System for Targeted Advertising. US Provisional Patent No. 61/051,104, filed on 5/6/2008.
Network Computer Game Linked To Real-Time Financial Data. US Provisional Patent expected to convert to US Application in January of 2009.
Ambient Software Integration System. US Provisional Patent expected to convert to US Application in April of 2007.
Method, Apparatus and Computer Program Product of Aliasing Discriminator for Encoder Interfaces. PCT Patent W02006020963, February 23 2006. [pdf]
Method and System for Enhanced Resolution, Automatically-Calibrated Position Sensor. PCT Patent W02005053146, June 9 2005. [pdf]
Talks
August 12, 2010 Presenter at Innovate 100's "World's Most Promising Tech Startup"PitchSlam Contest. Relay won! Video is here.
May 20, 2010 Presenter at the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association's annual conference, Capital Connection.
January 6, 2010 Guest presenter for Trip Davis'sFinancing New Venturesclass at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.
September 21, 2009 Guest presenter for two sections of Darden's Operations Strategy course.
September 1, 2009 Live case on Retail Relay for Darden's Marketing Intelligence class.Relay is the focus of 12 Marketing Intelligence student projects this year.
March 24, 2009 Panelist for the 2009 Virginia Specialty Food Educational Conference at the Boar's Head in Charlottesville, VA. The Panel is calledInnovative Marketing: Catering to "Buy Local" Consumers.
November 13, 2008 Invited Keynote Presenter at SAS Forum Mexico 2008 in Mexico City. Due to scheduling conflict, colleague Antonia de Medinaceli presented theField Guide to Text Miningtalk I developed for M2008. More informationhere.
October 29, 2008 PresentedField Guide to Text Mining: An overview of the people, tools, and research frontiers that are unlocking the predictive power of textat SAS's M2008 conference in Las Vegas. More information about the talk is availablehere.
September 16, 2008 Presented a text mining tutorial, as part of Elder Research's Annual 2-Day course entitledTools for Discovering Patterns in Data: A Survey of Modern Data Mining Algorithms. More information is available.