Dr. Earl Oliver

I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. My Ph.D. research was focused on building decentralized mobile systems to circumvent Internet censorship. I call this research domain Censorship Tolerant Networking. My thesis is here. The problem underlying my work is strongly correlated with Internet adoption and therefore getting worse. I hope to revisit it someday.

My personal email is: earl.oliver@gmail.com. My LinkedIn profile is always current. I use Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube.

Contact Information

My contact card (vCard) can be downloaded here.

Biography

Dr. Earl Oliver is Ph.D. in Computer Science, entrepreneur, and currently serves as CEO of Kyn Biosciences Inc - a seed and series A stage venture capital group based in Vancouver, BC. His work focuses on formulating investment strategy that creates cross-portfolio synergies and minimizes overall portfolio risk, and identifying and deeply analyzing candidate investments.

Previously, Dr. Oliver made his mark within the cannabis industry by turning around distressed cannabis assets and companies, most notably Gnomestar Craft Cannabis. In so doing, Dr. Oliver has become an expert on cannabis operations, is highly versed in the end-to-end cannabis supply chain, has helped many craft producers get to market, and is a vocal advocate for the craft cannabis community.

Prior to entering the cannabis industry Dr. Oliver served as Chief Technical Officer to VoteBlast Inc.; a Silicon Valley technology startup where he led the engineering team building high-performance systems to facilitate broadcast television-scale, real-time focus groups.

Dr. Oliver holds an Honours Bachelor of Mathematics (Computer Science) from the University of Waterloo and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. His Ph.D. work, where he created 'Censorship Tolerant Networking', focused on building decentralized mobile systems for disseminating content within countries with heavy Internet censorship. Dr. Oliver has built a career building systems for a wide-range of clients. He holds two technology patents and has many peer-reviewed publications.

Publications

Thesis

• Earl Oliver. Enabling Censorship Tolerant Networking. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Waterloo. 2012. bibtex

Conference / Workshop

• Earl Oliver, Srinivasan Keshav. An Empirical Approach to Smartphone Energy Level Prediction. The 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2011). Beijing, China. September 2011.bibtex talk
• Earl Oliver. Diversity in Smartphone Energy Consumption. MobiCom 2010 Workshop on Wireless of the Students, by the Students, and for the Students (S3 2010). Chicago, United States. September 2010. bibtex talk
• Earl Oliver. Characterizing the Transport Behaviour of the Short Message Service. The 2010 International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2010). San Francisco, United States. June 2010. bibtex talk
• Earl Oliver. The Challenges in Large-Scale Smartphone Usage Studies. MobiSys 2010 Workshop on Hot Topics in Planet-Scale Measurement (HotPlanet 2010). San Francisco, United States. June 2010. bibtex
• Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen, Earl Oliver, Jason LeBrun, George Varghese, and Christophe Diot. MobiClique: Middleware for Mobile Social Networking. SIGCOMM 2009 Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN). Barcelona, Spain. August 2009. bibtex
• Earl Oliver and Srinivasan Keshav. Design Principles for Opportunistic Communication in Constrained Computing Environments. MobiCom 2008 Workshop on Wireless Networks and Systems for Developing Regions (WiNS-DR). San Francisco, United States. September 2008. bibtex talk
• Earl Oliver. Exploiting the Short Message Service as a Control Channel in Challenged Network Environments. MobiCom 2008 Workshop on Challenged Networks (CHANTS). San Francisco, United States. September 2008. bibtex talk talk (extended)
• Abderrahmen Mtibaa, Augustin Chaintreau, Jason LeBrun, Earl Oliver, Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen, and Christophe Diot. Are You Moved by Your Social Network Application?. SIGCOMM 2008 Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN). Seattle, United States. August 2008. bibtex
• Shimin Guo, Hossein Falaki, Earl Oliver, Sumair Ur Rahman, Aaditeshwar Seth, Matei Zaharia, Usman Ismail, and Srinivasan Keshav. Design and Implementation of the KioskNet System. International Conference on Information Technologies and Development. Bangalore, India. December 2007. poster bibtex
• Earl Oliver, Hossein Falaki, Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Delay Tolerant Networking. Mobisys 2007 MobiEval: System Evaluation for Mobile Platforms: Metrics, Methods, and Tools Workshop. San Juan, Puerto Rico. June 2007. bibtex erratum

Journals

• Shimin Guo, Mohammad Derakhshani, Hossein Falaki, Usman Ismail, Rowena Luk, Earl Oliver, Sumair Ur Rahman, Aaditeshwar Seth, Matei Zaharia, and Srinivasan Keshav. Design and implementation of the KioskNet system. Computer Networks. August 2010. bibtex
• Earl Oliver. A Survey of Platforms for Mobile Networks Research. SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review. October 2008. bibtex
• Shimin Guo, Hossein Falaki, Earl Oliver, Sumair Ur Rahman, Aaditeshwar Seth, Matei Zaharia, and Srinivasan Keshav. Very Low-Cost Internet Access Using KioskNet. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. October 2007. bibtex

Patents

• Ardeshir Falaki, Earl Oliver. Various systems and methods for expressing an opinion. US 10,235,025. VoteBlast, Inc. March 19, 2019.
• Ardeshir Falaki, Earl Oliver. Enhancing public opinion gathering and dissemination. US 9,134,875. VoteBlast, Inc. September 15, 2015.
• Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen, Earl Oliver, Jason LeBrun, Christophe Diot. Social Networking Protocol for Mobile Social Networks. EP2138964A1. Thomson. January 2008. (Withdrawn)

Tech Reports

• Earl Oliver, Srinivasan Keshav. Data Driven Smartphone Energy Level Prediction. University of Waterloo Technical Report No. CS-2010-06. April 15, 2010. bibtex talk
• Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen, Earl Oliver, Jason LeBrun, George Varghese, Jon Crowcroft, and Christophe Diot. Experiments in Mobile Social Networking. Thomson Technical Report No. CR-PRL-2008-02-0003. February 2008. bibtex
• Earl Oliver. Design and Implementation of an SMS Control Channel for Mobile Systems. University of Waterloo Technical Report No. CS-2007-42. February 2008. bibtex
• Shimin Guo, Hossein Falaki, Usman Ismail, Earl Oliver, Sumair Ur Rahman, Aaditeshwar Seth, Matei Zaharia, and Srinivasan Keshav. Design and Implementation of the KioskNet System (Extended Version). University of Waterloo Technical Report No. CS-2007-40. November 2007. bibtex

Posters / Demo

• Earl Oliver, Enabling the Next Frontier in Mobile Applications. ExtremeCom 2009 Poster/Demo Session. August 2009.
• Hossein Falaki, Casie Ho, Usman Ismail, Alex Leong, Rowena Luk, Earl Oliver, Sumair Ur Rahman, and Srinivasan Keshav. KioskNet - Low-cost Internet Access for Developing Regions. SIGCOMM 2008 Poster/Demo Session. August 2008. poster

Non-published Work

• Earl Oliver, The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Financial Trading Systems (Survey), Unpublished, August 2010.
• Earl Oliver, A Survey of Mobile Database Caching Strategies, Unpublished, August 2007. bibtex
• Earl Oliver, Enhancing Mobile Content Delivery Using Multi-NIC Mobile Devices, Unpublished, December 2006.
• Earl Oliver, Jaime Ruiz, Steven She, and Jun Wang, The Software Architecture of the GIMP, Unpublished, December 2006.

Talks (not including conference/workshop talks)

• Networks and Distributed Systems Seminar, University of Waterloo, Enabling the Next Frontier in Mobile Applications (Short version), March 2009.
• Ph.D. Stage II Talk, University of Waterloo, Enabling the Next Frontier in Mobile Applications, March 2009.
• Networks and Distributed Systems Seminar, University of Waterloo, Exploiting the Short Message Service as a Control Channel in Challenged Network Environments, September 2008.
• Motorola Research Labs, Bangalore, India, Low-Cost Internet Access Using KioskNet, December 2007.
• Networks and Distributed Systems Seminar, University of Waterloo, Highlights from MobiSys 2007, July 2007.