About - Amir Husain

_ Amir

Amir Husain is a serial entrepreneur, veteran AI technologist, and author based in Austin, Texas. He has received widespread acclaim for his pioneering work, including Austin’s Top Entrepreneur award and inclusion in Austin’s 40 Under 40. His ventures have been lauded with CNBC’s fastest growing company awards and numerous other international recognitions.

In 2013, Amir founded SparkCognition, now Avathon. Under Amir’s leadership, the company achieved a unicorn valuation, marking a significant milestone in its journey. As the Founder and Executive Board Member of this award-winning AI company, Amir led the firm as CEO from its inception until the end of 2023.

Besides his contributions to SparkCognition, he also holds board positions at SpecFive, a mesh networking company, and Navigate, a decentralized data platform.

Amir founded the defense technology company SGS, chaired by former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Robert Work, and served as Founder, CEO, and Board Director of SkyGrid, a joint venture with Boeing.

An avid inventor, Amir has been awarded over 30 patents in AI and distributed systems. He serves on UT Austin’s Computer Science Board, NATO’s Innovation Advisory Board and the Board of Global Venture Bridge, fostering international entrepreneurial collaboration. His work has been featured in world-leading publications such as the BBC, Fortune, Forbes, and Proceedings from the U.S. Naval Institute.

He is the author of the best-selling book “The Sentient Machine,” a co-author of “Hyperwar: Conflict and Competition in the AI Century”, and has recently published “Generative Art”, “Generative AI for Leaders” and “Serious Machines.”

SpecFive is a mesh networking company based in Austin, Texas with the goal of creating a decentralized communications network at global scale. SpecFive has thousands of customers across the United States and Canada who use our products to enjoy communications autonomy. Whether it is connecting with friends on a camping trip when no cell phone signals can be received, or connecting thousands of machines together in an Industrial IoT network without the need to pay subscriptions to Big Telco. SpecFive has a solution for almost any decentralized communications use case.

We catalyze sustainable growth for our clients and throughout the world with proven artificial intelligence systems, award-winning machine learning technology, and a multinational team of artificial intelligence (AI) thought-leaders. Our clients are trusted with advancing lives, infrastructure, sustainability, and financial systems across the globe. They partner with SparkCognition to understand their industry’s most pressing challenges, analyze complex data, empower decision-making, and transform human and industrial productivity. With our leading-edge artificial intelligence products—Darwin®, DeepArmor ®, SparkPredict ®, and DeepNLP™—our clients can adapt to a rapidly changing digital landscape and accelerate their business strategies.

SparkCognition Government Systems (SGS), a wholly owned subsidiary of SparkCognition, is the first full-spectrum artificial intelligence (AI) company devoted entirely to government and national defense. By developing and operationalizing next-generation AI-powered systems, SGS enables government organizations to meet the needs of their most pressing national security missions. Using technologies built in the United States, SGS advances government operations by analyzing complex data to inform and accelerate intelligent decisions, applying predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve logistics, deploying autonomy technology for power projection systems, using natural language processing for large scale processing of unstructured data, and more.

SkyGrid, a Boeing, SparkCognition company, is powering the next generation of aviation. As the only airspace management system built on AI and blockchain, SkyGrid is solving the industry’s biggest challenges integrating drones in the global airspace and executing autonomous operations. SkyGrid’s AerialOS™ monitors, predicts, and adapts to changes in airspace traffic, environment conditions, and vehicle health to intelligently route, synchronize, and manage unmanned aircraft. Based in Austin, Texas, SkyGrid is enabling a wide variety of commercial drone operations from package delivery to emergency assistance.

_ORGS

Center for a New American Security: Amir served on the CNAS Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and National Security, which was launched in 2013 and chaired by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work and Dr. Andrew Moore, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Council on Foreign Relations: Amir is a current member of CFR and served on its Task Force on U.S. Innovation Strategy and National Security, which was chaired by Admiral William McRaven. In 2019, the task published the report Keeping Our Edge which offers new ways for the U.S. to address innovation in national security.

University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Science: Since 2015, Amir has served on the Board of Advisors for the Department of Computer Science at UT Austin. He is a graduate of UT Austin Computer Science and the Department honored him at their 50th anniversary by selecting him as one of five speakers representing an “alumni showcase”.

NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Innovation Advisory Board: Amir is a current member of the NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Innovation and Coordination Cell’s (MUSIC^2) MUS Innovation Advisory Board (IAB). Inspired by Amir’s talks on Exponential Technologies, the IAB was formed in 2020 and aims to amplify the MUS mission of accelerating the pace of development and integration of unmanned systems in Allied and Partner navies.

Media

AI is not a product; it’s a way of thinking. And it’s already empowering innovators to tackle the world’s most pressing problems today! Created to inspire a vision for the future and to help the world’s top decision-makers navigate the potential of AI, the Time Machine conference, presented by SparkCognition, has become the world’s premier AI & future tech summit.

Amir Husain serves as the Editor in Chief at Cognitive Times, an AI thought leadership magazine published by SparkCognition. Cognitive Times demonstrates AI’s transformative impact across multiple industries including consumer technology, national security, aerospace, oil and gas, and other technology-related fields.