People

Meet the humans behind the technology.   

Don't let the science stuff fool you. We're really just people trying to make things better for other people – whether it's conserving energy for the next generation, keeping information from taking over our lives, or just letting you know if it will rain this afternoon.

Meet Ambient’s Board of Directors


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Ted Vann

VP of Business Development

With 20 years experience helping energy companies solve problems, Ted is uniquely suited to help utilities and energy suppliers solve their foray into bringing the smart grid into consumer’s homes.  In his role at Ambient, he is responsible for developing business relationships with energy utility providers.  His extensive operations, information technology and customer service backgrounds are the key drivers in his proven record of delivering exceptional business solutions.

Pritesh Gandhi

Pritesh Gandhi

CEO, Co-founder

Pritesh has more than 15 years of experience building companies focused on delivering innovative consumer applications across multiple industries. In addition to overseeing Ambient Devices operations and strategy, he has been the driving force behind the company's expansion into the In-Home Display market. Through his direction and management of Ambient's retail partnerships, the company has brought over one million units to the shelves of retailers including Best Buy, WalMart and Brookstone.

Pritesh received his BS and MBA from Boston University, where he concentrated in Marketing and Entrepreneurship. While pursing his MBA, he wrote the business plan for Ambient Devices and co-founded the company shortly after graduation.

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Lou Casavant

Chief Financial Officer

Lou began in public accounting with Arthur Andersen and Co. in their Boston office and held various finance positions at Patriot Bancorp and Data General Corporation before joining Brookstone Company as their controller. He has held finance positions with Childworld a large box retailer, Childcraft, a direct marketer of children’s furniture, toys and clothing and Finast, a food retailing division of Ahold USA. As the VP Controller of GCC Companies, Inc. he led a major financial system implementation, developed a strategic financial model and a detail weekly cash flow forecasting model and performed due diligence in the Company’s international theater acquisition. As the CFO of Victory Distributors, Inc., a $400 million independent privately held grocery chain he assisted the owners in the sale of the company to a competitor. As a financial consultant he worked with start-up clients to develop business plans and assist with raising capital. Prior to joining Ambient, Lou was with Tatum LLC, a national financial executive services firm. Lou has extensive financial leadership experience within consumer products and retail, developing business plans, performing financial modeling and analysis, accounting processes, financial systems and reporting. He is a CPA and received his BS in accounting from Boston College.

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Hiroshi Ishii

Advisor

Hiroshi Ishii's research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment.

Hiroshi Ishii is a Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, at the MIT Media Lab. He joined the MIT Media Laboratory in October 1995, and founded the Tangible Media Group to pursue a new vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): "Tangible Bits." His team seeks to change the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits" by giving physical form to digital information and computation.

Ishii and his students have presented their vision of "Tangible Bits" at a variety of academic, industrial design, and media art venues including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, and Ars Electronica, emphasizing that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review. A display of many of the group's projects took place in "Tangible Bits" exhibition at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo in summer 2000. A new, three-year-long exhibition "Get in Touch" that features the Tangible Media group's work opened at Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria) in September 2001.
Since July 2002, he has co-directed the Thing That Think Consortium at the MIT Media Lab.
He was named Associate Director at the Media Lab in May 2008.

Prior to MIT, from 1988-1994, he led a CSCW research group at the NTT Human Interface Laboratories, where his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. In 1986 and 1987, he was a visiting research associate at GMD (The German National Research Centre for Computer Science) in Bonn, Germany. In 1993 and 1994, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Computer Systems Research Institute of the University of Toronto, Canada.

He served as an Associate Editor of ACM TOCHI (Transactions on Computer Human Interactions) and ACM TOIS (Transactions on Office Information Systems). He also served as a program committee member of many international conferences including ACM CHI, CSCW, UIST, SIGGRAPH, Multimedia, Interact, ISMAR, and ECSCW.

In 2006 ACM SIGCHI elected Ishii to the CHI Academy recognizing his substantial contributions to the field of Human-Computer Interactions through the creation of new genre called "Tangible User Interfaces."
He received B. E. degree in electronic engineering, M. E. and Ph. D. degrees in computer engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 1978, 1980 and 1992, respectively. He was born in Tokyo in 1956, and started to play with PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) in 1958.