About Us
We’re here to change the trajectory of AI
The AI landscape is dominated by solutions that sacrifice integrity
for power. We refuse to compromise. We’re building high performance AI you can trust.
Who We Are
Advance trustworthy AI as the global standard.
Empower researchers, academics, and Fortune 500 companies to make critical decisions with conviction using explainable AI.
Howso is built on two core values:
Gracious intellectual honesty. We tell the truth to each other, to our customers, and to our community. We do so with respect and humility in service of our mission.
Trusted autonomy. We believe in each person’s capacity for impact. We provide our people with the space, tools and trust to do their best work, and then get out of the way.
These values permeate our technology, culture, and advocacy in the broader AI community.
History
Humanity is making critical decisions with technology prone to hallucinations, bias, and opacity, believing that’s the necessary price to pay for powerful AI.
That’s unacceptable. We’re doing something about it.
From Alexa to Chat-GPT, we’ve seen explosive growth of AI applications in everyday life. Unfortunately, that explosion has been built upon “black box” neural networks, which can go wrong in surprising ways and can’t be debugged.
Howso co-founder Dr. Chris Hazard spent decades focused on understanding deeply complex, interactive computing systems. His research lies at the intersection of trust and AI. Recognizing the inherent dangers in deep neural nets and black box AI, Chris set out to build AI that’s as powerful as it is understandable. His first systems were built in the defense sector, where the “why” is just as critical as the “how.”
Chris, his longtime collaborator Michael Resnick, and advisor Dr. Michael Capps founded Howso (formerly Diveplane) in 2017. Capps had retired after a decade as President of Epic Games (Fortnite, Unreal Engine) and shared Hazard’s concerns about the direction of AI development. The vision was simple: they would work towards positive social impact first, profits second. A group of like-minded angel investors and philanthropists came together for the seed round, and the company began its mission to bring Chris’ maturing research to the world.
More than sixty patent assets later, we’ve deployed our ever-evolving technology in academic institutions, non-profits, global financial enterprises, healthcare organizations, and government agencies. Our users are empowered to make decisions directly from data, rather than relying on abstract black box models. They can interrogate outcomes, correct mistakes and bias, and make critical decisions responsibly.
In September 2023, we renamed ourselves Howso and released this powerful engine with an open source license, taking a critical step on the path towards meaningful social impact.
Explainable, human-understandable AI is possible. Let us show you how.
Founders
Dr. Michael Capps
Co-founder, Chairman
Dr. Michael Capps
Co-founder, Chairman
Dr. Capps spent most of his career building Epic Games from 20 employees to a global gaming powerhouse, leading the creation of the Unreal Engine, the Gears of War Franchise, and Fortnite. He retired as president of Epic Games in 2012 to focus on family. In 2017, Capps came out of retirement to see if he could make a dent in one of the largest problems we face today – the ethical problems of black box AI making decisions that negatively affect people’s lives and welfare. The founders of Howso agreed that the company’s top goal was the replacement of black-box AI with transparent, ethical methods – even above profits – and Howso’s investors share the goal of social impact alongside entrepreneurial return.
Capps is an industry thought leader in the development of responsible data and AI practices. In 2020, he co-founded the Data & Trust Alliance, a CEO-level non-profit focused on creating and sharing best practices for safe data and AI. Alliance members include the CEOs of Walmart, IBM, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer. Capps personally led the Algorithmic Bias Safeguards for Workforce initiative, whose work has been adopted by global enterprises as part of vendor selection.
Capps regularly advises US lawmakers on issues of national resilience, modernization, and humanity’s existential need for responsible AI and led the Competitiveness Council for the Business Executives for National Security.
Dr. Chris Hazard
Co-founder, CTO
Dr. Chris Hazard
Co-founder, CTO
Dr. Chris Hazard is co-founder and CTO of Howso. Howso’s understandable and privacy enhancing AI spun out of Hazardous Software, a company Chris founded in 2007 that focuses on decision support, visualization, and simulation for hard strategy problems in large organizations, DoD, and government. Chris holds a PhD in computer science from NC State, with focus on artificial intelligence for trust and reputation. He was a software architect of CDMA infrastructure at Motorola, worked on robot coordination and logistics at Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), is an active member of the CompTIA AI Advisory Council, and advised NATO on cyber security policies. He has led simulation, serious gaming, and software projects related to cyber security, social engineering, logistics, economics, and psychology, and is a certified hypnotist. Dr. Hazard is also known for his 2011 game Achron, which won GameSpot’s Best Original Game Mechanic award, and for his research on AI/ML, privacy, game design, and human-computer interaction, for which he has given keynote speeches at major conferences and been featured in mainstream media.
Mike Resnick
Co-founder, Technical Fellow
Mike Resnick
Co-founder, Technical Fellow
Mike Resnick is a co-founder and Technical Fellow at Howso. He has spearheaded the engineering of the core of Howso’s AI technology beginning from its inception at Hazardous Software, a company Mike co-founded in 2007. With 20 years of experience in the software engineering, design, and architecture, Resnick’s expertise spans many different domains including machine learning (with multiple patents), video game development, cloud systems, full stack web application development, telecommunications, and network infrastructure.
Leadership
Gaurav Rao
CEO
Gaurav Rao
CEO
Gaurav Rao is a veteran technology executive with more than 20 years of experience in scalable data, ML, and AI solutions.
Most recently, Rao served as executive vice president and general manager of AI at AtScale, a groundbreaking business intelligence and data science company. Prior to that, Rao led product at deep learning startup Neural Magic and held multiple executive roles at IBM spanning engineering, product, and sales.
Will Goddin
CIO
Will Goddin
CIO
Will joined Howso as Chief Information Officer in 2019, following more than 20 years in the software industry. He held senior leadership roles at IBM and Carbon Black, a leading endpoint security company (acquired by VMWare in 2019). He has broad experience in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and cloud services operations. At Howso, Will puts decades of experience leading customer-oriented teams to work, ensuring the successful testing, deployment, and use of the Howso platform. Will oversees all security and data privacy operations.
Dr. Michael Meehan
General Counsel, Chief Legal Officer
Dr. Michael Meehan
General Counsel, Chief Legal Officer
Dr. Michael Meehan is the General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer of Howso Incorporated. He has shepherded numerous companies to strong positions, both in terms of ongoing operations and in preparation for funding and acquisition. In addition to advising numerous startups as an attorney and board member, his career includes driving the IP position of the maps and geo business unit at Google, as well as leading and dramatically growing Uber’s IP legal team. Before becoming an attorney, Dr. Meehan completed his PhD in computer science at UNC concentrating on virtual reality, and he has held research positions at Stanford (where he later attended law school), an Italian hospital, Eastman Kodak, and a Swiss government research lab. He also worked extensively in the tech industry on the engineering side, working his way from computer programmer to CTO and director of engineering at various dot.coms. When he is not working on closing deals or positioning Howso, you will find him training for half marathons and triathlons, and chasing his two toddlers around.
John Emmert
Head of Sales
John Emmert
Head of Sales
John is the Global Head of Sales for Howso. Prior to Howso, John spent 13 years with IBM in a variety of sales, technical, and executive roles primarily focused on Data and AI. He has helped organizations solve complex business and technical problems in the areas of Customer Experience, Environmental Social Governance (ESG), Resilience and Security, as well as Modernization of core systems and processes. John has a deep background in Data, AI, and Automation across sales, product go to market, and engineering. He graduated from East Carolina University and currently lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife and three children.
Accolades
Accenture chooses Howso (formerly Diveplane) for 2023 FinTech Innovation Lab NYC.
March 2023 – Howso was one of 10 companies chosen from over 200 applicants to take part in the FinTech Innovation Lab New York, a 12-week program founded and run by Accenture that helps fintech startups accelerate growth. Howso joined peers tackling cybersecurity, risk, sustainability, and the use of AI to improve financial services, getting hands-on product and business development mentorship.
Gartner selects Howso (formerly Diveplane) for the International Council’s Annual Go Global Award in AI.
October 2021 – Howso, the company keeping humanity in artificial intelligence, was named a winner in the Artificial Intelligence category at the International Trade Council’s Annual Go Global Awards Ceremony.
Gartner names Howso (formerly Diveplane) a 2020 Cool Vendor
April 2020 – Gartner named Howso as a Cool vendor in the
category of Core AI solutions. The technology research firm went on to state that the Howso Synthesizer “is a pioneer in the area of tabular synthetic data, which can be a game changer in problems where training
data is sparse, incomplete or unavailable.”
Contact Us
Request a demo, ask us a question, or just say, ‘Hi.’
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421 N Harrington St Ste 320
Raleigh, NC, 27603
United States