PIXEL FORENSICS - Key Persons


Andrew Merlino - CEO, Founder, President

Job Titles:
  • CEO
  • Founder
  • Member of the Leadership Team
  • President
Andrew brings over 30 years of industry experience to Pixel Forensics. He has gained technical, business and management skills from companies large and small. While at Raytheon, he was part of Raytheon's electronic part analysis program involving CAD/CAM and decision tree analysis. At MITRE Corporation, Andrew managed "Broadcast News Navigator", breaking new ground in automated on-demand news processing. At Virage, he established and managed the Virage Advanced Technology lab in Massachusetts; building it into a successful, self funded research and product development organization. After Virage, Andrew established and managed a successful and profitable image analysis group at BBN Technologies. Pushing technology in new, exciting and innovative ways is a repeated career theme which continues as Andrew leads Pixel Forensics forward. His thirst for taking on new challenges and developing solutions that address complex challenges is a driving force behind Pixel Forensics. As prior customers and business associates will attest, Andrew has a reputation for delivering on time and on budget while keeping customers informed every step of the way. Andrew's core business values are simple: Integrity, Teamwork, and Excellence. As a recognized leader in his field, Andrew has attended and presented at numerous technical conferences. He has taken numerous business and management courses at Boston University as well as corporate seminars. Andrew graduated with a B.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a M.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Northeastern University. He currently holds two patents and has published a variety of papers. Andrew lives in Massachusetts with his wife, two daughters and son.

Dean Doody - CTO, Founder

Job Titles:
  • CTO
  • Founder
  • Member of the Leadership Team
Dean has over 30 years of experience and success with meeting customer challenges. Dean spent 16 years at Hewlett Packard Co. where he held a wide range of technical positions from managing escalated hardware and software support issues, to teaching X-Windows programming, to selling and supporting computer aided software engineering (CASE) products. Dean served as 'Performance' lead on the Navy TAC-4 bid and proposal team where he gained important insight into what 'performance' really means. HP won TAC-4 valued at $672M. As Technical Lead on the National Weather Service AWIPS II program, Dean helped to win the deal for HP with custom developed 2D and 3D graphics applications. While at Netpower, Dean helped to push the first Intel-based high performance workstations for video and 3D graphics processing into the marketplace and was an evangelist for video based distance learning tools. As part of a successful Virage Sales team, Dean sold and supported state-of-the-art video indexing, encoding and search tools as well as video archiving and webcasting solutions. Before helping to found Pixel Forensics, Inc., he spent 3 years with BBN Technologies as part of a nascent image processing organization where he architected and implemented user interface components. Dean is a firm believer in meeting with customers early and often to gather requirements for system design and implementation. But that's only part of the solution. Pushing beyond requirements to understand other potentially related workflows and challenges is equally important. Doody believes by doing this- "You discover the unintended consequences, both good and bad, that result from a particular solution design". His years of experience and hands-on approach to project life cycle management has worked for Dean. His ability to listen to and work with his customers has brought him success and praise. Dean graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech. While he's not working, Dean lives in Maryland with his wife and two sons.

Dr. Allen Sears

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Advisory Board
Allen Sears brings over 35 years of expertise in Federal markets and multimedia research and development from his positions at DARPA, MITRE, Unisys, and most recently the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). His work as Vice-President at CNRI focused on developing national research initiatives that could be transitioned to operational users within the Military, Homeland Security and elsewhere. While at DARPA, he served as a Program Manager and Assistant Director for Technology Transfer in the Information Technology Office, and also managed DARPA's human language technology research. Early in his career, Allen served in the US Navy as a carrier-based naval aviator.

Jared Berg

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Leadership Team
  • Vice President, Advanced Technology, Founder
Jared brings over 15 years of academic, research and industry experience to Pixel Forensics. Jared spent 6 years at the Digital Image Analysis Laboratory (DIAL) at Scripps Institute of Oceanography on the UCSD campus in La Jolla, California, where he focused on developing custom solutions for analyzing and processing both geostationary and polar orbiting satellite data. Analyses included, but were not limited to, geophysical trend analysis (global atmospheric water vapor, surface temperature and precipitation) and atmospheric content detection (airborne volcanic ash, Asian dust). He was also a primary designer and constructor of the Parallel Image Processing Environment (PIPE), a large 48-node (96 processor) Beowulf compute cluster used specifically for the efficient distribution and large-scale processing of satellite data. Jared then spent 3 years at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the image analysis group. There Jared used his expertise in numerical analysis, machine learning and image processing to develop image pattern extraction and recognition solutions to work on photographs and documents for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. Jared graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a B.S in Computer Science and Engineering, and is currently a coauthor on eight peer-reviewed scientific papers related to image analysis and/or image processing. Jared leads the Pixel Forensics engineering team in designing new, creative solutions that leverage original and prior research to solve real customer problems. "Research is important, but must eventually be applied outside of the academic vacuum. Results and satisfaction are what ultimately matter."

Paul Lego - CEO

Job Titles:
  • CEO
  • Member of the Advisory Board
Paul Lego is an entrepreneur and CEO with more than 30 years experience in the Silicon Valley. He is currently the CEO of Coherent Navigation, and has served as President, COO or CEO at such start up companies as Bespoke Innovations, Dash Navigation, Virage, Avid and DigiDesign. Paul has been through three IPOs (including one as COO and one as CEO), as well as 4 successful acquisitions. In addition, he worked as a venture partner at Sutter Hill Ventures and an Executive in Residence at Trinity Ventures. Paul is an active adventure traveler, climber and pilot. He has been to the North Pole, and climbed Mt. McKinley in Alaska, Kilimanjaro in Africa and Cho Oyu in Tibet.

Ric Upton

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Advisory Board
  • Founder of Gloucester Innovation
Ric is a founder of Gloucester Innovation, LLC focused on bringing innovation and technology to coastal communities on Massachusetts' North Shore. His prior experience includes President of Near Infinity Corporation(Reston, VA), a small business specializing in cloud, mobile and enterprise software solutions, Executive-in-Residence with General Catalyst Partners, a $3.0B venture capital firm headquartered in Cambridge, MA, and Executive Vice President for Healthcare Informatics and Intelligence with BBN Technologies (now a part of Raytheon Corporation). Ric has been involved in the development and growth of technology-based businesses for more than 30 years. Ric served as an Executive Vice President for Strategic Development at Pixel Forensics, Inc., where he focused on accelerating the growth of the company by expanding its offerings and partnerships in multimedia analytics and visual big data mining to customers in national security, defense, homeland security and law enforcement, as well as commercial markets. Ric also served as an advisor to Accuvant, a leading source for enterprise security solutions, Privaris, aprovider of biometric security solutions for physical and logical access, theComputer Science Department, University of Maryland and the Bourne Schoolof Engineering, UC Riverside. Ric holds advanced degrees in ComputerScience from the University of Maryland and the University of Pennsylvania.

Tom Jordan

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Advisory Board
Tom is an accomplished sales professional with an outstanding track record in Public Sector Enterprise Computer Systems. Currently, he leads Hewlett-Packard's mid-tier Federal System Integrator Group and has performed as an Enterprise Server, Storage and Networking Product Specialist as well as Public Sector Channel team lead for Hewlett-Packard's Technology Solutions Group. Some of Tom's specialties include channel economics, partner asset analysis and development, Federal Government procurement policy, Enterprise IT architectures, and market evaluation and development.