Scott Stephenson

Co-Founder, CEO

2015

Deepgram builds accurate, fast, scalable, and affordable large scale AI for speech recognition and understanding. Available as an API running in the public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise. The system learns your company name, product names, and jargon, and gets better over time leading to unparalleled accuracy.

Venture Partner

2018

Postdoctoral Researcher

2014 - 2015

I worked on the Large Underground Xenon Detector (LUX/LZ), a large and sensitive Dark Matter detector, and in developing the Davis Xenon (DaX) dual-phase liquid xenon detector program at UC Davis. LUX/LZ is a large scale deep underground Dark Matter detector located in a former gold mine in Lead, SD. A team of hundreds of scientists and engineers built and operate the LUX detector to probe the cross-section of WIMP-nucleon interactions (e.g. detecting when a Dark Matter particle hits a normal, everyday atom). The LUX detector is being upgraded from several hundred kilos to multi-ton scale to create LZ. This collaboration represents the largest and most sensitive effort to date in directly detecting dark matter. (http://luxdarkmatter.org/) DaX is a newly constructed R&D detector at UC Davis used to investigate light and charge sensors with varied geometry and topologies. The DaX system has a dual-phase 3D position sensitive liquid xenon time projection chamber (which can tell with high precision where a particle collided in the liquid xenon target and how much energy was deposited in the collision). Novel light detection devices (e.g. Silicon Photomultipliers) are tested alongside traditional techniques to evaluate the efficacy of the new technology for use in sophisticated particle detectors. The rapid progress made with DaX informs the next generation of multi-ton dark matter detectors. (http://lux.physics.ucdavis.edu/)

PhD Graduate Student

2010 - 2014

I built deep underground Dark Matter particle detectors (detector design, construction, operation, and data analysis) for the Particle and Astrophysical Xenon (PandaX) collaboration and the Michigan Xenon (MiX) experiment. PandaX is a large dual-phase xenon Dark Matter detector located near Xichang, China. The detector was built and tested Shanghai Jiao Tong University, then deployed in Jinping lab—the deepest lab in the world. PandaX-I probed the low mass WIMP-nucleon cross-section parameter space in search of Dark Matter. (http://www.pandax.org/) MiX is a dual-phase liquid xenon particle detector located at University of Michigan. MiX demonstrated excellent energy and spatial resolution and operated stably for very long periods of time. This performance and stability enabled leading resolution measurements for liquid xenon as a particle detection medium. The Lorenzon group currently operates MiX with several detector topologies to inform the design of the LZ experiment. (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.00410v1.pdf)