John T. Rickard

John Terry Rickard

"In 1975 Dr. Rickard joined Dr. Alspach at ORINCON Corporation International as its first employee, and ended his first career with the company in 1994 as Senior Vice President and Technical Director. He has served as a Board member of the company since 1981. During the period 1975-1994, he was instrumental in the development of several fundamental advances in U.S. defense capabilities and national intelligence collection systems in the technologies of undersea warfare and image processing. He also led ORINCON’s diversification into international markets.

"From 1994 to 2001, he served first as President, and later as Chief Scientific Officer of OptiMark Technologies, Inc. He is a co-inventor of the OptiMark transaction matching system and several derivative products, and was instrumental as President in the development of the company from a start-up enterprise to an operating entity on the Pacific Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq market and the Osaka Securities Exchange, including the securing of over $330 million in investment capital from major venture capital firms, Wall Street investment bankers and international corporations.

"In January 2001, he rejoined ORINCON as Senior Vice President, where his focus was on broadening the company's technology base, particularly in machine intelligence. He designed a novel approach to information extraction from non-textual databases (for which he authored three new patent applications), a concept for the defense of commercial airliners against surface to air missile attack, a fuzzy graph representation for physical and virtual networks, and a novel multi-dimensional clustering algorithm.

"In June, 2003, ORINCON was acquired by Lockheed Martin Corporation, and Dr. Rickard was appointed to the position of Senior Principal Research Scientist. In December, 2005, he was elected a Senior Fellow of Lockheed Martin, where he continued his work in advancing the company’s business base in advanced technology until his retirement in January 2008.

"Dr. Rickard has served in the past on the board of directors of three companies, one of which was a public reporting company. He has authored over 40 technical publications in several branches of engineering, and in the fields of electronic market structure, matching algorithms and trading strategies, which have appeared in refereed technical journals, books and conference proceedings. In April, 2006 he received the "Author of the Year" award from Lockheed Martin for his publications on conceptual spaces. In addition, he has authored seven patents, one of which describes a novel concept for the use of nanocrystals in airliner defense against shoulder-fired surface to air missiles.

"He received his BSEE (1969) and MSEE (1971) from Florida Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from University of California at San Diego in 1975. He obtained the Series 7, 63 General Securities Licenses, and Series 24 General Securities Principal License in 1995 for his work at OptiMark."

• Managing Director, Homeland Venture Partners