Who We Are

Steve Suddarth Dr. Suddarth is a retired Air Force Colonel with a 24-year military R&D career involving a wide variety of R&D, management, teaching, and executive functions, as well as research in machine learning, autonomous vehicles and image processing. Dr. Suddarth served as Director of the Configurable Space Microsystems Innovation and Application Center (COSMIAC) at the University of New Mexico (2007-2011). He has also operated as a consultant and as the founder of Transparent Sky from 2007-present. Notably, Dr. Suddarth started the Angel Fire project, forming its team and leading it through all of its early development. Dr. Suddarth also performed consulting for Logos Corporation, Rockwell-Collins International, LANL, and Raytheon Company. Other relevant work includes the development of a first-ever 3-dimensional mixed analog/digital image processor which advanced the State-of-the-Art by 3 orders of magnitude (VIGILANTE). Dr. Suddarth also built and tested several airborne optical sensing systems, unmanned aerial robotics systems, and software systems for large military space programs.

Hadi Akbarpour is a senior engineer at Transparent Sky as well as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. His research activities include development of computer vision algorithms for 3D reconstruction, structure-from-motion, bundle adjustment to support thousands of cameras. Developing algorithms for generating large scale point cloud for accurate urban area reconstruction. Multi-view aerial image registration, stabilization in presence of strong parallax, vehicle tracking, and video analytics. During his PhD, he was involved in research projects funded by European Union FP7 Research Framework, collaborating with different universities and research institutes, including FOI - Swedish Defense Research Agency. In 2010, he was awarded a prize for excellence in research by Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization (DSTO, which is the Australian analogue of DARPA), in DICTA-2010 (the premium Australian conference on machine vision and pattern recognition).

Dave Eichhorn Major General Eichhorn (USAF RET) brings 35 years experience in aircraft systems, avionics, test, project management and flight operations. As an Air Force officer, he led the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Command (AFOTEC) with over 650 staff and test oversight of $650 billion in programs at over 12 locations. Gen Eichhorn also served as Commander of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB, as well as the Commander of Arnold Engineering and Development Center (AEDC). He has over 6,100 hours in more than 47 types of aircraft. David has participated as a collaborator and partner in the development of Transparent Sky for over three years, and his expertise in system design and test has served to guide the path toward both development and test of the “Village Peacekeeper” concept.

Deborah Suddarth (P.E.) is an experienced civil engineer with nearly 20 years experience who currently serves as Transparent Sky's business manager and head of marketing.