Small but mighty. Passionate and focused. Four PhDs and counting. Meet the BluWave-ai team.
/bluwave-ai/images/BW_Blue_logo_PMS_reverse-e4f85.png){kind=logo}
Small but mighty. Passionate and focused. Four PhDs and counting. Meet the BluWave-ai team.
In founding BluWave-ai, Devashish Paul leveraged his extensive background in the semiconductor industry, primarily in supercomputing, AI and networking chips. He has grown businesses in Europe, Asia, and North American from startup to up to $110M annual revenue run rates at both public and private companies.
Devashish is driving BluWave-ai's mission to be the premiere global renewable energy AI company. Devashish earned a B.Eng. degree from Royal Military College followed by a Masters in Electrical Engineering (Digital Signal Processing) and an MBA in Marketing, both from the University of Ottawa.
He is a veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force. He is also a 31-time Ironman triathlon finisher, has coached masters athletes to 100+ finishes, and raced for Canada in ten world championships.
CEO AND FOUNDER
/bluwave-ai/images/image-ID-fcff8203-a805-4e89-fa90-d2be6a19a60e.png)
/bluwave-ai/images/image-ID-f0b22cd4-f9c5-48d3-d391-63e347c24ad4.png)
Dr. Mostafa Farrokhabadi is the technology and innovation leader at BluWave-ai. He has more than eight years experience in designing mission critical grid solutions for industry and academia, including smart grids and microgrids projects with Hatch and Canadian Solar.
Mostafa has (co)authored several articles in high-impact journals, conference proceedings, and magazines, and holds patents on intelligent control and optimization of renewable-penetrated grids. He has also led the award-winning IEEE Power and Energy Society Task Force on microgrid stability, an international coalition of 21 researchers from 14 institutions investigating stability issues in microgrids.
Mostafa obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. He has also studied and performed research in Sweden at KTH and Germany at KIT.
During the course of his career, Mostafa has received multiple business, research, and teaching awards, including the prestigious Ottawa's Forty Under 40.
When not busy researching and developing smart grid solutions, Mostafa actively raises awareness on climate change and energy poverty, enjoys reading about science and history, and contemplates the future of the human species.
SENIOR DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY
Interested in joining the BluWave-ai team? Visit our Careers page.
Nathaniel Charlebois designs, implements, and integrates back-end software at BluWave-ai. As a recent Computer Systems Engineering graduate from Carleton University he has a keen interest in distributed, scalable systems, and has been involved with Secure Smart Grid networking research at Carleton’s Cisco IoT laboratory. When not behind a keyboard developing projects, Nathaniel can be found cycling, running or enjoying a pint of craft beer at a live music venue.
ENGINEERING
In her 30+ years of professional life, Marlene Alt has honed her communication skills in a diversity of roles. She cut her teeth in B2B technology companies, first in the early days of Newbridge Networks and more recently at Nokia and cleantech startup Rockport Networks. She's also advocated for the arts through working with individual artists, professional companies and government agencies, and spent countless hours (and still counting) in strengthening the well-being of our community through volunteer work in education, sports and recreation.
Marlene earned a B.A. in English Language and Literature at Western University and an M.A. in the same at the University of Victoria, BC.
When not flying the BluWave-ai flag, Marlene is a cross-country skier, trail and ultramarathon runner, biathlete, arts advocate and lover of wild places worldwide.
SENIOR CORPORATE MARKETING MANAGER
/bluwave-ai/images/image-ID-e95ab0de-0d85-4c0c-9741-5ccd212df61b.png)
QUALITY ASSURANCE
Sergey Cherniavsky is a Software QA Lead with over 12 years of experience in web, mobile, embedded, and cloud systems. As an experience QA lead, Sergey has a deep understanding of software development methodologies, quality assurance strategies, process, procedures, and best practices.
Sergey loves to play ping-pong and to explore new beautiful places with his family in Canada and the United States.
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING
Craig Downing has over 20 years experience in technology companies in a wide range of areas including, specialized and high-performance computing devices for consumer, communication and industrial applications, hardware device security and software security, machine vision, graphics and image processing.
Craig’s roles in these companies included technical team management, managing integration projects with customers, international business development, technical product marketing and product management defining, bringing to market and managing the lifecycle of systems, software and electronic device products.
TECHNICAL SALES LEAD
Tim Guttormson has 18 years of experience bringing advanced software solutions to customers solving complex problems in the world of integrated circuit design. He’s passionate about communicating the benefits of the BluWave-ai solution to the world, while applying his field engineering experience to build a team in that area for the company as it grows.
In his spare time, Tim enjoys training for triathlons, travelling and spending time with family.
Owen Kelly is a data-oriented R&D engineer with experience defining systems with statistically driven requirements. Passionate about using computation and analysis to leverage measured data. Rigorous and practical. Fascinated by numbers, Owen’s role at BluWave-ai is to use quantitative skills to deliver measurement-aware policy optimizations for energy micro-grid systems.
Owen is equally comfortable sharing quantitative outcomes with customers, as working independently on complex mathematical formulations. He has an unabridged enthusiasm for numbers!
Owen earned a B.A.Sc. in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University.
APPLIED SCIENCE
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Alex Linchieh is a Product Manager at Bluwave-ai. He previously held lead engineering, planning, and project management roles within the energy, consulting, and defense industries. Alex's interest is focused at the intersection between engineering and business, particularly regarding the future of smart cities and the implications of AI on society.
Alex has a B.Sc. In Materials Engineering (with a Nanotechnology minor) from the University of Alberta and holds Professional Engineering (P. Eng.) and Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designations.
In his spare time, Alex enjoys photography, hiking, sports cars, and building high performance computers.
GENERAL MANAGER, USA
Francois Odouard is an analytics and data executive, passionate about helping organizations develop solutions to data, IT and process challenges. Throughout his career, he has successfully defined visions addressing objectives articulated by senior management, aligned stakeholders at all levels of the organization, designed potential solutions and led execution teams.
Francois has held executive positions in major firms such as American Express, Morgan Stanley and IBM. He holds a B.Sc. in Commerce from HEC Paris, and an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics.
Francois likes to compete in triathlons and explore all the cultural life that New York City has to offer, when he is not traveling to far corners of the world with his wife and children.
MARKETING
Brandon Paul completed his degree in marketing at the University of Ottawa in 2018. While at school, he also took electives in Roman history and 19th-21st century world history. Brandon continues his education on the world by trying to learn something new everyday, avidly reading texts and listening to podcasts on history, politics, and society. Brandon is very passionate about storytelling and is in the process of creating his Space Opera novel series. He likes to contemplate what he's learned on his morning run and has completed five half marathons since 2014.
APPLIED SCIENCE
Nasrin is a Senior Smart Grid & AI Scientist at BluWave-ai. Prior to that, she was a Ph.D. scholar at the smart grid team in IDLab. During her tenure in IDLab, Nasrin successfully applied AI in four major industry projects, developing solutions using statistical modeling, machine learning, and deep reinforcement learning, to facilitate practical demand response algorithms for residential customers and electric vehicles in the smart power grid.
Nasrin's Ph.D. research led to several high impact international publications. She obtained her Ph.D. in computer science from the Faculty of Engineering, Ghent University, Belgium, in 2018.
Nasrin loves traveling, exploring different cultures, and meeting new people.
Hubert Sugeng drives the product development at BluWave-ai. He’s been working in engineering for over 16 years, with recent leadership roles delivering product with AI-based KodaCloud, and Bridgewater Systems (acquired by Amdocs).
Hubert has led the development of performant, scalable, and fault-tolerant products running in national level mobile carriers, as well as cloud SaaS with IoT devices. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Systems Engineering from Carleton University.
Aside from building cool stuff at BluWave-ai, Hubert loves to game, play badminton, and is very curious about how everything works from tech, to macro-economics, to astronomy.
DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING
Dr. Lutz Tischendorf develops and integrates software at Bluwave-ai. He has an extensive background in software development, system administration and project management and is a recognized scientist in the field of computational biology. He has worked in IT for 20 years and has been CTO of a German-based company Esemos GmbH for 11 years.
Lutz led the development and operations of high performance and high availability software in support of powering internet and intranet searches for the German Telekom and multiple online portals and ecommerce sites. He was also primarily responsible for managing and analyzing big data.
Lutz is the author and co-author of more than 40 peer reviewed publications and is still active in research related to applying optimization methods to problems in conservation ecology.
In his spare time, Lutz enjoys the outdoors on ski, foot, bicycle, sailboat or canoe, serves as a director at the Northern Magic Fund in support of helping children in Kenya and likes to travel and explore the world.
ENGINEERING
ENGINEERING
Praveen Venigalla is a Junior Full Stack Developer at BluWave-ai. He is mainly responsible for designing, building, and integrating several frontend interfaces for the existing backend systems. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, JNTU Kakinada, India and a postgraduate degree in Information Technology, Humber College. His favourite hobbies are reading non-fiction, cooking, doing yoga, and travelling.
Richard Vieregge works on the BlueWave-ai team developing the SaaS platform hosting our energy optimization software. He has decades of software development experience, having developed security analytics for Nokia, deployed large scale network auditing systems to tier 1 carriers at Nakina System, and led the Network Management group at Tropic Networks. Richard holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Waterloo.
After work, Richard enjoys exercise as an excuse to socialize with family and friends, and traveling to experience our wide world.
ENGINEERING
Dr. Yujie Xu develops statistical and machine learning solutions for smart power girds at BluWave-ai. He is generally interested in applying machine learning and optimization techniques to various systems.
Yujie earned a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto. In his spare time, Yujie loves to cook all kinds of cuisines.
APPLIED SCIENCE
APPLIED SCIENCE
Ying Yao finished her Masters in Statistics at Carleton University and for the three years since has been working in the data analysis/data science area. The projects she contributed to range from time series forecasting, image classification, business intelligence reporting and analysis for federal government clients and the banking industry.
Ying is excited about applying machine learning techniques and diving into specific industrial environments to deliver advanced products. She enjoys having a healthy work-life balance which can bring her more motivation. In particular, Ying likes travelling, adventurous sports, and jamming with friends.
Frank Wang is a Software Engineering Co-Op student from University of Ottawa currently developing infrastructures to automate real-time training and deployment of BluWave-ai's machine learning models. He has an undergraduate degree in Molecular Genetics from University of Toronto and a Masters degree in Biochemistry from University of British Columbia. During his spare time he researches topics in deep learning. His past works include characterizing a deep learning model that can recognize deforming objects and building a graph neural network to perform multi-hop reasoning. His most recent interest is neural search engines. After work he plays lots of DotA 2.
ENGINEERING
Muhammad manages the Finance, Accounting, and Human Resources operations at BluWave-ai. He started his career in Corporate Banking, as a Management Trainee, and quickly moved up to the role of Relationship Management.
Muhammad has completed a BSc. in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering and has recently completed an MBA from Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa.
He is passionate about finance, business ethics, and holistic fitness. In his spare time, he likes to have coffee chats, read books on the economy and human psychology, and practice calisthenics.
OPERATIONS ANALYST
James Aitken is an innovative sales leader with nearly 15 years account management experience. James thrives in fast-paced, dynamic organizations displaying a passion for excellence and an unwavering commitment to customer service. Fluent in English and French, he drives sales excellence with up to date knowledge of the client, the market, and the solution. James utilizes his competitive and determined spirit to win business.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT