Main  |  Professional

Who

Flashsear.net is Aaron Brown, 30-something computer scientist and avid amateur musician, chef, and photographer, currently living in Westchester County, NY. I am not a news anchor for CNN. I spend my days as an executive responsible for IBM's advanced client engagement around content analytics, text analytics, and information access solutions, as part of IBM's Information Management, Analytics & Optimization services organization in the IBM Software Group. Visit my Content Unlocked blog or connect with me on Twitter @aaron_b_brown and Facebook.

Previously, I ran strategy and product marketing for the Discovery, Analytics, and Search pillar of the IBM Enterprise Content Management software business, where I was responsible for IBM's offerings for content analytics, eDiscovery, content classification, content assessment, and enterprise search.

Prior to my role with IBM ECM, I did strategic alliance development for Software Group, where amongst other things I built IBM's partnership with Yahoo! that led to the creation of IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, a groundbreaking no-charge enterprise search engine. Prior to moving over to the business side of IBM, I was a researcher at IBM Research, where I worked on new ways to make big computing systems more self-reliant and easier to administer, and helped develop aspects of the new field of services research. See my professional page for more details.

I grew up near Boston, MA, went to high school in Cambridge, and decided to stick around the area to attend college at Harvard. I arrived back on the east coast in New York in 2004, after a 7-year sojurn to Berkeley, CA, where I picked up a PhD from UC Berkeley, met some wonderful friends, discovered the joys of fresh produce, rediscovered photography, lamented the lack of real seasons, and all in all learned a lot about myself.

These days work keeps me pretty busy, but I try to find time to keep up with my other interests. A big part of my life is filled by music--I've been playing violin since before I was 4 years old, and for many years was the concertmaster of the Prometheus Symphony, a community orchestra based in Oakland, CA. I continue to play today, now with the Yonkers Philharmonic.

I'm also an avid amateur chef, baker, and self-professed lover of great food; I love to cook and to seek out new and interesting restaurants and cuisines. I even once took part in a mock Iron Chef battle (back before Iron Chef was the Food Network-powered phenomenon it is today)--a friend and I duked it out in my kitchen for two hours to see who could create the most interesting and tasty dishes out of the three surprise ingredients unveiled by a panel of our friends serving as judges: cactus, bison, and leeks. Now that's a challenge! (For the record, I came up with cactus paddles stuffed with jack cheese, breaded, fried, and served over a tomato sauce; a leek tart; and pan-seared bison steaks accompanied by mushroom-cognac sauce, roasted new potatoes, haricots verts, and creamy oven-braised leeks.)

Finally, I've always been fascinated with the art of photography, and recently returned to it after a long hiatus. I'm working entirely digitally now, with Canon EOS D30 and 20D DSLRs, and while I'm still developing an understanding of this new electronic medium, I'm having a great time learning and taking pictures. I'll be posting pictures on this weblog, and many of my photos are online in my photo galleries and on my Picasa page.

Contact

The best way to reach me is by e-mail:

Last updated: 09-Jan-2010