The Maker's Lounge is envisioned as a place where members of the global Makerspace community can share their projects and creations, and socialize. The BigScreen application is serving part of this role today, but is a general purpose application without any of the Makerspace-specific functionality that this community desires. This project is in the requirements-gathering phase.

While pursuing a bachelor's degree in psychology at Rice University, Derek worked part-time at MD Anderson Cancer Center in the biostatistics department. Derek's role was to design and develop software for clinicians to assess endpoints in clinical cancer trials based on Bayesian monitoring criteria. This was done under the direction of Dr. Peter Thall. Other statistical challenges included estimation of error rates in fluorescent in-situ hybridization studies, for which Derek received publication credit in the British Journal of Statistics. At Rice, publications in eyewitness testimony and memory were also obtained.

As an intern while at Rice, and following graduation, Derek worked at Compaq Computer Corporation. Initially in the human factors department, where his primary role was the development of a consumer-focused product called MediaPilot, which was the first comprehensive suite of multi-media editing and playback tools to ship on a consumer PC. Following this, Derek moved to the communications group at Compaq and shipped telephony hardware to support the Microsoft Taz telephony server.

Derek moved to Seattle to join Microsoft, initially in a usability engineering role on Systems Management Server, a platform for system administrators to manage networks and servers. In this role, Derek ran a long-term field study of network administrators which was central to understanding their mental models and needs. This experience supported a move to the Windows team where Derek was the first program manager, and eventually lead program manager, on a product called the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). This was an integrated shell to hold the administration tools for windows server and the BackOffice suite of products such as SQL server, Internet Information Server, Exchange Server, and others. At the height of MMC's adoption there were over 50 client groups using the shell and Derek was responsible for the project as a whole in a managerial capacity - and the development of SDK samples, a Microsoft Press book, and numerous development talks in an individual contibutor role. MMC still ships in Windows 10.

Wanting to get back into research, Derek joined the Microsoft Research Speech Technology team to lead a project called MiPad, or Multimodal Interactive Notepad. This project was focused on speech recognition on handheld devices, but in a period prior to the processing power on those devices being capable of running the speech recognition process locally. Some local processing enabled compression of the data to be sent over the network to servers to do the speech-to-text and natural language understanding. Although the product was many years away from release to consumers, it formed a central part of the product strategy vision and Derek presented demos in Senior VP Craig Mundie's vision presentations and during Bill Gate's keynote address to the joint conferences on artificial intelligence, among other high profile PR and corporate strategy venues.

Shipping software to customers has always been a serious motivating factor for Derek, and when the speech research group divided into a research arm and a new product team, Derek returned to the product groups to work on Microsoft Speech Server. This platform for doing large-scale speech recognition was aimed primarily at telephony and support center uses. Specifically, Derek ran the SDK team. Although throughout his Microsoft career Derek managed between 2 and 4 direct reports, it is during this period where Derek's team grew to support a larger project and at the peak of the effort Derek managed a team of 20 developers, testers, and designers who were delivering the software development kit for the speech server and designing the user interface for the product. As the speech server neared shipping, the team moved out of the Natural User Interface division and back into Windows and Derek took on an individual contributor project to create the "How-Do-I" language model. This was derived from typed text data, modified algorithmically to adapt to spoken language patterns, and shipped with windows so that users could request help on operating system features using spoken natural language queries.

Derek left Microsoft to return to Canada, specifically to pursue graduate work at the University of Victoria (UVic). The interest in speech recognition and computer-mediated interpersonal dynamics led to a master's thesis topic of Collaborative and Automatic Annotations to Meetings. In this project, Derek used both automatic speech recognition and iClickers (a student annotation device used primarily for in-class quizes) to annotate a class record with important points. This was developed in C# and Microsoft Silverlight as a web application. User studies showed that these annotations were able to significantly increase the value of class recordings to subsequent information extraction tasks.

During this time Derek also developed a deep interest in biology, specifically the emerging field of synthetic biology. Taking many undergraduate courses in microbiolgy, genetics, and bioinformatics laid an academic framework, but the most exciting applications of the field lay in practical applications. Derek founded the first iGEM team at UVic. iGEM, international Genetically Engineered Machines, is a yearly synthetic biology competition sponsored by MIT. The UVic team took a silver medal in this competition for the creation and characterization of a bacterial thermometer.

During his time at Microsoft, Derek built a house. A 3500 square foot geodesic dome for which he acted as general contractor and carpenter. The woodworking was interesting enough that after leaving Microsoft Derek attended the Northwest school of wooden boatbuilding to learn how to build a mast and replace planks on his 1951 William Garden designed pinky schooner. As he was settling into Victoria, Derek's woodworking and mechanical hobbies, not to mention a growing accumulation of biology gear, began to overwhelm his garage. At the same time, the lack of a cohesive technically-oriented social network was a growing concern. Unlike the vast tech community in Seattle or the San Francisco Bay area, Victoria was lacking social opportunities.

The solution was to found a Makerspace. This is a community-organized non-profit workshop which provides workshop space, classes, and social opportunities to its members. The Victoria Makerspace began as a modest affair in 600 square feet of outbuilding in a farmer's field, but by today has grown to 150 members and over 4000 square feet of workshop space in the Vancouver Island Technology Park.

Under Derek's leadership as executive director, members have built out metal shops for welding, sheet metal work, and milling and metal lathes. A woodworking shop. An electronics shop. A molecular biology lab, Canada's first community biology lab in fact, which Derek has gone to Ottawa to represent to Health Canada as a growing trend of interest in science education. Makerspace has two laser cutters, three 3D printers, a green screen recording studio with music and filmmaking gear, a computer classroom, and an ever-growing virtual reality lab. The Victoria Makerspace has received national and local press and television coverage, seen the formation of numerous inventions and small businesses growing out of the space, and are in a comfortable partnership with the University of Victoria.

Although the Makerspace biology lab is a good teaching lab, Derek's molecular and synthetic biology aspirations required a more comprehensive space. He founded a scientific consultancy company called Biobit enterprises and fitted out a lab next to Makerspace. This lab is designed as a biosafety level 2 facility, meaning that it is capable of handling infectious materials when certified to do so by Health Canada, and contains microscopy facilities, microbiology facilities for the culture and analysis of bacteria, yeast, and algae. Culture facilities for plants and worms. Genetic analysis facilities including quantitative polymerase chain reaction equipment (qPCR) and next-generation sequencing equipment from Illumina. And chemistry and protein analysis gear, including nano-particle production and purification capabilities. An early effort to engage in micro-fluidic processing gear is also underway in collaboration with other Makerspace members.

Although the commercial activities of Biobit have ebbed and flowed with the time-pressures of Makerspace and UVic activities, the focus on biotechnology afforded by a dedicated space has allowed Derek to be a regular contributor to biotech publications such as BioCoder, and to pursue longer term development projects. Derek gave a TEDxVictoria talk on the importance of focusing on biotechnology.

Singularity University (SU) is a technology entrepreneurship program at Nasa Ames founded by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Based on the idea of exponentials changing the face of technology, and the world, the summer global solutions program focuses students on global grand challenges that effect a billion or more people. In my first year there, I attended as a student and led the construction efforts on a project to develop aeroponic vegetable growth chambers. In subsequent summers I have attended as a biotechnology instructor and led students through DNA transformations, human genetic testing, DNA species barcoding, and the development of many fascinating group project ideas. Now directly supported by Google, the network of SU graduates and sponsors is a window into the heart of silicon valley and an ideal marriage of technology and business. Singularity University

It was also at Singularity University that I met Raymond McCauley and the other folks at BioCurious, a biology-focused hackerspace in Sunnyvale. With the resources of silicon valley and its ability to dream big, BioCurious has been an example to aspire to in the development of Makerspace. I helped them initially create their lab, and have also used the lab to teach the SU classes. It was also there that I led the lab portion of the 2012 FBI-organized DIY bio summit. This international gathering of community labs was the first time that the global scale of the community lab movement was realized.

Derek's PhD at the University of Victoria was co-supervised by both psychology and computer science. It focused on the use of consumer-grade electroencephalography (EEG) headsets for the diagnosis and treatment of attention deficit disorder. These EEG headsets, costing several hundred dollars rather than the tens of thousands of dollars research grade equipment costs, were previously thought to be too unreliable for research use and were intended primarily for computer gaming and meditation training applications. Rather than their intended use of monitoring recurring frontal lobe activity, Derek used the equipment to detect stimulus-locked neural activity - specific brain responses to an on-screen stimulus. These event-related potentials (ERPs) are the basis of many psychological and neurological studies, and various clinical conditions exhibit systematic changes in the pattern or ERPs observed. In the particular case Derek was studying, an ERP called the P300 was observed to be attenuated in the case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Derek used noise reduction algorithms to reduce the impact of lower-quality headsets, and machine learning techniques to determine when P300 responses were observed. These responses were used to create a brain-controlled spelling package which was used as a form of neurofeedback. After multiple sessions of using the apparatus, the P300 responses were found to have strengthened in normal subject populations. It remains to be seen whether this holds true in ADHD populations and whether behavioral correlates of the altered brain responses can be determined.

As the PhD was winding down, Derek took a turn back towards user interface design in working with UrtheCast, a satellite imagery company, to produce a development console for writing python scripts to analyze earth imagery data. Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) the web application uses React and ES6 and follows modern web development practices in an application framework which leverages parallel computing to run the imagery analyses in a map-reduce paradigm. Derek architected the technical direction and has been supervising students at UVic and coordinating with developers and remote sensing scientists at UrtheCast to release this development environment on the UrtheCast platform.

Derek has also been working in the Unity development engine and has owned an Oculus virtual reality headset since the DK1 was released in 2013. Derek is co-organizer of the Victoria Virtual and Augmented Reality Meetup. With more hardware on the way, the Victoria Makerspace is home to a group of VR and AR enthusiasts in this rapidly growing development area.

Derek's teaching experience spans both institutional and non-institutional settings. He has developed and taught the third-year human-computer interaction course at UVic, SENG310. He has also developed curriculum and taught the first year CSC101 course which is the result of funding by the provincial government for job creation.

At Makerspace, Derek has developed classes on the laser cutter and 3D printer, in the electronics area on the Arduino microcontroller, and has partnered with the Stan Winston School of Character Arts to teach a class on Arduino-based animatronics for movie effects. Derek also teaches an introduction to microbiology, create your first genetically modified organism, and DNA barcoding in the biology lab at Makerspace, and teaches an introductory bioinformatics course designed to teach individuals how to interpret and work with their genetic data from providers such as 23andme.

At Singularity University, Derek teaches introductory lab courses and lectures on digital biology.