Abstract: After ten years of focused research, Tam Vu embarked on a new endeavor in 2018: turning his earable computing invention into a consumer product. Beyond his scientist's imagination, what followed was seven years of grit and grind until FRENZ Brainband was finally launched. Invested by Founders Fund and Samsung Ventures, FRENZ is now helping thousands of users across 37 countries sleep better.

In this talk, Tam shares lessons learnt through his journey, from the initial research idea to founding Earable Neuroscience and launching FRENZ. He unpacks the challenges of translating academic research into a real-world product, and shares how the team navigated hardware design hurdles, mass manufacturing complexities, team assembly, while securing multiple funding rounds from top-tier venture capital firms. He will further share his hard-earned lessons on leadership, resilience, and the entrepreneurial mindset, highlighting differences between the lab and startup worlds.

This talk offers researchers, students, and aspiring innovators practical strategies and resources to bridge the gap between laboratory research and market impact.

Bio: Tam Vu is the Thomas A. and Georgina Tugwell Russo 1977 Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College and the Founder/CEO of Earable Neuroscience. His research in mobile and networked systems has been recognized with Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and multiple Best Paper Awards at ACM MobiCom. Prior to Dartmouth and Earable, Tam was an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford and the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directed the Mobile and Networked Systems Lab.

Tam has led Earable Neuroscience to scale to over 100 employees, raised multiple rounds from Samsung Ventures and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and delivered thousands of products to users across 37 countries. By pushing his team to focus on consumer-centric elements such as aesthetics and fashion, he led them to win Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Innovation Awards three years in a row (2023–2025), as well as the Red Dot Design Award.

With a vision to meaningfully improve human well-being, his current focus is to enhance human performance and extend healthspan through innovative sensing systems and AI-powered wearables.

Abstract: To be announced

Bio: Hui Zhang is Co-founder, CTO and Chairman of the Board of Conviva, a global leader in real-time data analytics. Under his leadership, Conviva has pioneered how to measure and optimize digital experience of consumers at Internet-scale and in real-time. Conviva platform has won multiple awards including Google Partner of Year Award, Data Breakthrough Real-Time Data Platform of Year Award, Confluent Data Streaming Case Study of the Year Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Network Systems Award.

Zhang is also a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has been a faculty member since 1995. Zhang has done pioneering research in video streaming, Internet architecture, and real-time big data analytics. His papers have won multiple awards including three ACM Test-of-Time Awards. He has advised several award-winning thesis including Ion Stoica's Ph.D. dissertation which won ACM Dissertation Award in 2001 and Junchen Jiang's Ph.D dissertation which won Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2017. His students include professors in top universities, entrepreneurs of successful companies, and technologists in leading companies.

Zhang was elected to be a Fellow of ACM in 2006 and received the Alfred Sloan Fellowship in 2000. He received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 1996 and held the Finmeccanica Chair in Computer Science at CMU from 1998 to 2001. Zhang received a bachelor's degree from Beijing University, a master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley.