Cary Kornfeld, Ph.D.

Cary Kornfeld often sees himself as a Mozartian figure: a tragic genius who dies at the age of 30 in poor health, literally starving. Of course, neither is true. Dr. Kornfeld might be a tragic figure, but he's no Mozart. And if he were, he's outlived Mozart by at least twenty years.

Seriously, life has been relatively kind. Born in WWII veteran housing in the shadows of Disney Studios where his dad worked as an animator, he managed to survive the banality of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. Unlike his friends, who learned to surf, play beach volleyball and party, he wasted his youth building telescopes, earning a Ham radio license, spending weekends in a community photography center developing film and creating prints. He has been a nerd for as long as he can remember.

He often claims his life began when he first left home at the age of 16. It was a turning point in his life. The freedom of adulthood was intoxicating. It still is.

With the grace of God, he received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from UCLA. He works a variety of odd jobs to put himself trhough college. These span the gamut from being a live-in houseboy at UCLA's ecumenical Religious Conference Center, working as a waiter at campus banquets, selling hot dogs at UCLA basketball games, working at the campus computer center as an operator as well as being awarded an NSF Undergraduate Research Fellowship for two of his three years at UCLA. He was also a member of UCLA's Honors College, a program for gifted students. This must surely have been some sort of clerical mistake because at that time there were only ~300 students in the program out of the 33,000+ students at UCLA. Clearly a mistake!

Dr. Kornfeld re-emerges a few months after graduation in Seattle, seeking passage to the oil riches of the Alaskan North Slope. Fortunately, his Seattle relatives persuade him to spend a few months living in Seattle while they introduce him to every unmarried young woman within their extensive circle of friends. He takes a job as a chemist in the Oceanography Dept at the University of Washington. Within a few months he becomes a graduate student in the Marine Geochemistry division of the Oceanography department.

After a few years, tired of seemingly endless rain, the early winter darkness and the wet piercing cold, he locks up his houseboat (I'm not making this up), walks to the nearest entrance to Interstate 5 and sets out on a journey that will consume the rest of his life. During that period he hitchhikes around the world: he works as a seaman on freighters, as a mechanic on fishing boats and as a longshoreman on the Seattle docks. He occasionally writes computer programs for quick money, learns to speak Spanish in a Mexican Jesuit retreat organized to teach priests enough Spanish to give mass and finally, gets mixed up in the Vietnam war.

When he returns to the states, he tries to hitchhike again, but he's now older and is no longer willing to be an anonymous rider in the car of a lonely stranger. Something has changed.

He enjoyed the simple monastic life he'd experienced in Mexico. He'd found comfort in some aspect of it, but did not know or understand why he was drawn to these people and this reclusive, nearly baren life.

The wild energy of constant travel is now nearly spent. He wanders for a few days in Oakland before buying a bicycle,. He loads his worldly goods onto it and heads off into the California wilderness. His journey takes him from one end of California to the other. He ends up living in a Buddhist monastery where he's eventually ordained.

Now somewhat older, he moves to Berkeley where he begins to settle from his youthful exuberances. He takes a job as a Systems Programmer at a tiny computer company, meets an attractive divorcee with three kids and attempts to settle into a traditional family oriented life. It's soon apparent that he is not well suited for "family" life.

We next find him living in Silicon Valley working for a very small tech company whose only client is a secret agency of the US Government. He credits the many years he spent in the Monastery for the ease and quickness to obtain his security clearances. As his colleagues mysteriously died of rare forms of cancer, he moves to a larger company that does the same kind contract work but with many more clients throughout the Government. His work is sufficiently classified that his international travel privileges are restricted for many years.

During this time he takes graduate courses in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Amassing the maximum number of 'off-campus' course credits, he takes a year's sabbatical to complete his Masters Degree at Stanford.

While at Stanford, as a lark, he takes the PhD qualifying exam. Again, another apparent clerical error occurs because it is reported that he is among the 40% who pass the exam. Considering that he has never taken an undergraduate level EE course in his life, his success on the exam is nothing short of either a religious miracle or a clerical error.

During that year he is offered a job at a small software company in Seattle that will eventually become Microsoft (he is recruited by Steve Ballmer who tries to convince him to drop out of school to make some serious money). He also becomes involved in the earliest design of the MIPS microprocessor (his retargetable code generator is used to develop it's instruction set, he writes a variety of performance simulation tools), he also designs and builds a collection of innovative graphics chips for an experimental workstation that will eventually become the first SUN workstation. He takes a summer job at Xerox PARC.

The summer job at PARC turns into a full time position. He spends the next four years at PARC, occasionally dropping in at Stanford. He regrets his carelessness because he did not create strong links into the Stanford Faculty. His work (at PARC) on the development of electric paper was the basis for his dissertation. Eventually, everyone decides that its time for him to be awarded a Ph.D.

We next find Dr. Kornfeld at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey where he's a Principal Investigator/MTS in the Research Division of the labs. These, he will later proclaim, are the best years of my life. Bell labs is a wonderful environment. He meets and befriends a lot of interesting and famous people. He is surrounded by interesting people. He works literally day and night. Within a few years he's developed one of the first functioning optical computers. It is also the largest neuro-computers ever built. Someone in the public relations dept of the labs discovers this work. It's like being strapped to a rocket, he sometimes mutters, within a few months he appears on CNN for less than a minute and suddenly he receives "fifteen" minutes of fame. He doubts that anyone other than his mother remembers those few precious seconds.

Dr. Kornfeld's life is replete with bad choice and mistakes. He leaves Bell Labs, accepting a very high paying position as a founder of The NEC Research Institute in Princeton. He is quickly disillusioned. At the labs he had ready access to an enormous collection of labs and resource, he is allowed to work on anything he likes but knows he will have to defend his use of that time within a few years. It is the opportunity of a lifetime. It is Geek Nirvana. Working for a Japanese company will be entirely different.

NECÝis the most organized, methodical company he has encountered in his life. Every moment is carefully planned. Every decision is thoroughly discussed and evaluated. No one acts independently. No one is allowed or encouraged to do "after hours" projects. He has little access to his employers technology. He makes numerous trips to Japan, meeting with everyone from the janitors to the vice presidents, but is unable to convince anyone to fabricate one of his optical circuit designs. He ends up teaching CS courses at Princeton Unviersity where he begins experimenting with stereoscopic imaging.

We next find Dr. Kornfeld in Silicon Valley where he's once again a founder of a new research lab funded by Paul Allen, co-fournder of Microsoft called Interval Research. He is selected as one of the initial 7 "project coordinators" and builds a series of innovative, inventive telepresence systems. Only a very small, select handful of people (a few hundred, at most) have seen and used these systems which seems sad because they are among the best work he's done in his life. All of these prototypes were lost. The only remaining remnant are a few hours of video footage captured during what would be it's last use within Interavl -- it's last annual project review.

Despite his best efforts, Interval manages to self-destruct. It still amazes him as to why a company that is so richly endowed and is chartered to find the "next big thing" completely misses the internet, focusing instead on creating high tech toys that were too expensive and complex to be profitably manufactured.

At this point, Dr. Kornfeld is fed up with corporate life. He's tired of empty rhetoric. He's tired of the annual budget squabbles. He's tired of endless meetings that never seem to result in any tangible outcome. At this point, Dr. Kornfeld shows signs of severe career burnout.

He rents a small industrial space in the part of town your parents tell you to avoid and establishes Kornfeld Design: an independent consultancy and a home for developing technical ideas and concepts. He spends the next five years doing a small amount of consulting, spending most of his time in his lab developing what will become a modest handful of inventions: a method for transforming digitally printed images into near photographic prints, a variety of stereoscopic systems (e.g. a stereoscopic mirror), some interesting haptic systems, etc.

The Dot Com era eventually drives Dr. Kornfeld out of business. When the era was hot he picked up work evaluating patents for corporate clients. But just before the top of he bubble, the building in which Dr. Kornfeld's lab was located is bought by a real estate speculator. The rent is doubled, then quadrupled, then increased again. Eventually, all of the tenants (despite having leases) are forced to leave. The developer sells the property for twice what he paid. Sixteen small service companies are dislocated. The rich get richer.

George W. Bush is declared winner of the 2000 Presidential electrion. The dot com bubble bursts. The economy begins to collapse. Within months all of Dr. Kornfeld's consulting clients have disappeared or will disappear within 12 to 18 months. His one remaining pro bono client, the Medical School at Stanford, enables him to begin taking classes. He spends the next year taking as many classes in the nonclinical curriculum as is possible. He also meets Dr. Robert Chase who provides him with a lab and office and a small equipment budget.

The two share a common interest in stereoscopic imaging. Dr. Chase owns several large collections of Gruber's stereoscopic images (Gruber is the inventor of the Viewmaster Stereo viewer): A collection of several thousand images of Asian Art treasures, the Bassett Collection of Anatomical images, etc.

Dr. Kornfeld builds a series of stereoscopic imaging systems -- a museum kiosk for Dr. Chase's various collections, a variety of stereoscopic capture systems and eventually a stereoscopic video imaging system now used for teaching surgery and anatomy.

Dr. Kornfeld now spends most of his time writing and filing patents, writing grant proposals, attending seminars and participating in a variety of courses, seminars and workshops where his equipment is now used.

Dr. Kornfeld claims that he has no hobbies: that his work is his hobby. He sometimes swims with a local master's team. Over the last dozen years, he's organized, planned and run a variety of conferences at Stanford: Hot Chips, Hot Interconnects, Bio-informatics, etc. As well as being on the program committee of several others: Compcon, the Asilomar Microprocessor Workshop. He maintains a visiting scientist affiliation with Microsoft, participates in a variety of professional activities (SMPTE, IEEE, SigGraph) and he attends the Hacker's Conference (a gathering of some of the world's most talented, creative and uniquely odd individuals).

His life would have been completely different if he'd listened to Steve Balmer and had taken that job at Microsoft.

-- C. Kornfeld
(Stanford 2003)