Kurt received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Indiana University in 1984 and then joined the research division of AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1991 he joined Synopsys, Inc. where he ultimately became Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice-President of Research. In 1998 Kurt became Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Kurt’s research now focuses on parallel computing and its application to computer vision, speech recognition, multi-media analysis, machine learning, and computational finance.
Kurt has published six books, over 250 refereed articles, and is among the most highly cited authors in Hardware and Design Automation. Kurt was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1996. At the 50th Design Automation Conference Kurt received a number of awards reflecting achievements over the 50 year history of the conference. These included “Top Ten Cited Author” and “Top Ten Cited Paper.” He was also recognized as among one of only three people to have received four Best Paper Awards in the history of the conference.
As an angel investor and advisor Kurt has served as an angel investor and advisor to twelve start-up companies including Coverity and Tensilica. Of these twelve, seven have already seen profitable exits. Altogether these companies have returned over a billion dollars to investors. Kurt has also served as an advisor to eight other start-ups including two that went on to become public companies: C-Cube Microsystems and Simplex. Kurt also services on the Board of Directors of the non-profit corporation Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (www.tbrc.org).