Eric Schafer

Eric Schafer has been in the tech industry for over 25 years. Eric began their career in 1996 as a Lead R&D Software Engineer at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), where they were responsible for texture mapping and image processing software. Eric then moved to Moon Express, Inc. in 2013 as a Senior Software Engineer, followed by a Principal Graphics Software Engineer role at SGT at NASA Ames in 2015. In 2017, they joined Iris Automation Inc. as a Simulation Architect, where they engineered a photorealistic flight simulator for training AI autopilots to avoid other aircraft, generating airspace training data for Deep Learning models deployed on embedded vision systems. Eric also built a scalable Synthetic Data pipeline and infrastructure from the ground up and led a small team of engineers constructing Digital Twin environments and improving Monte Carlo simulation techniques. In 2022, they took on the role of VP of Simulation Engineering at Neo Cybernetica.

Eric Schafer has a Masters degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University.