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Nathan Aschbacher

Tech Entrepreneur & Software Engineer in Portland, Oregon

Nathan Aschbacher is a prominent figure in the tech industry, known for his extensive experience in software development, leadership, and functional safety. Here are the key points about him:

  • Background and Education: Nathan Aschbacher obtained a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Gonzaga University between 1998 and 2002. He also holds an Automotive Functional Safety Professional certification from SGS-TÜV Saar, issued in December 2017.12

  • Professional Experience: Aschbacher has held various leadership roles across several companies:

    • Co-Founder & CEO at Auxon Corporation: Since September 2018, he has been responsible for defining the technology strategy and instilling best practices at Auxon. The company focuses on building tools for validating the execution paths of autonomous vehicles and other complex systems to ensure safety and reliability.24
    • Chief Technology Officer at PolySync: From September 2016 to August 2018, he worked on software suites and the commercialization of open source car control by-wire platforms.24
    • Lead System Architect at Visa: In 2015, he worked on Open VisaNet, a global payment and processing system.1
    • Chief Architect at Snapflow: In 2014, he focused on machine learning algorithms and horizontal scaling.1
    • Principal Consulting Architect at Basho Technologies: In 2013, he prototyped and implemented distributed systems and data-driven applications.1
    • Senior Architect at Coradine Aviation Systems: In 2012, he established the architecture and implementation of a scalable platform.1
    • Mobile Software Engineer at Maximus: From 2003 to 2005, he led the development of FleetFocus FA mobile asset management software.2
    • Programmer Analyst II at Dotster: In 2002, he maintained and extended existing core registration, billing, and support software components written in C and PHP.2
  • Other Roles: Aschbacher has also been involved in non-profit work, serving as the President of the Board for CenterStage & Ella's Supper Club from 2005 to 2007.2

  • Publications and Engagements: He has been published as a contributing author in O’Reilly’s “Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice” and has been featured in various tech communities for his expertise in mission-critical software and systems.34

Nathan Aschbacher is recognized for his dedication to ensuring the safety and reliability of complex systems, particularly in the automotive and autonomous vehicle sectors. His extensive experience and certifications make him a key figure in the tech industry.

Highlights

Feb 13 · linkedin

Testing complex systems is a daunting difficult challenge, but without doing it rigorously (and ideally as automatically as possible) your product development lifecycle both pre- and post-deployment get stuck in a never ending quagmire of corner cases that won’t stay in their corners and whole teams of engineers spend all their time fighting fires.

It’s very nice to see signals like the huge Seed round just announced by Antithesis that the broader marketplace is coming around to recognize the value the same way that top performing teams and engineers have for a long time.

Jan 25 · linkedin

In almost any system composed of a bunch of interacting parts, where "parts" can be literal physical sensors & actuators or even virtual parts like processes & threads, there are all kinds of parallel execution paths and patterns of interaction that occur.

Patterns of execution in many IT systems often have a nice, roughly V-shaped motif with a well understood beginning (e.g. inbound API request), working down through the stack from the frontend to the backend(s), and back up again with a well understood ending (e.g. response returned from API).

Robotics & cyber-physical systems tend to be much more continuous and much, much more messy in nature. They're typically overlapping loops on loops on loops interacting with each other, interrupting each other, branching off or running in parallel with subsystems used for redundancy to preserve safety or security. The system's correct behavior is often necessarily a convoluted stew of control loops, fail-operational error & recovery paths, and almost always are hopping between physical components along their execution path (e.g. sensing to deciding to safety monitoring to acting, etc.).

Since the system is likely comprised of multiple different components in different time domains, some without any sense of time at all, there's rarely an obvious "beginning" to execution. If you're lucky, the consequences of anything that happens in the system might have obvious local effects, but more often they have long-tails leading to non-obvious effects elsewhere in the system that are extremely difficult to identify and debug.

The "causal graph of execution" data model in our Modality system-level trace database and our SpeQTr query & specification DSL were specifically created and refined (through use cases from AVs to lunar rovers) to make navigating and pulling valuable insights out of all that complexity feel absolutely trivial.

To give you a sense of what I mean, here's a brief video introduction to the "causal graph" data model in Modality (https://lnkd.in/gbrmX9cJ) and how to use SpeQTr (https://lnkd.in/gcBr3wxr) to get at anything and any relationship that exists between any part of a delicate pile of temperamental components... ahem... I mean robot or cyber-physical system.

https://lnkd.in/gvFw-5vk

#robotics #embeddedsystems #systemsintegration #systemsengineering #cyberphysicalsystems #observability #hiltesting #freertos #embeddedlinux #simulation

Related Questions

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Nathan Aschbacher
Nathan Aschbacher, photo 1
Nathan Aschbacher, photo 2
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Experience

Co-Founder & CEO at Auxon Corporation since September 2018
Chief Technology Officer at PolySync from September 2016 to August 2018

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Gonzaga University (1998 - 2002)

Location

Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area