Dr. Denny Dahl

Dr. Edward (Denny) Dahl received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University in 1985. His thesis work was with Richard Blankenbecler at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center on Hamiltonian methods in lattice gauge theories. Dr. Dahl transitioned into the field of neural networks in the 1980's, applying Hopfield networks to a variety of optimization problems and studying accelerated convergence techniques for stochastic gradient descent. He worked at Thinking Machines Corporation in the technical marketing group and was responsible for helping users develop algorithms that could run in the SIMD (single instruction multiple data) computational model. He obtained a patent for mapping irregular grid architectures to the hypercube architecture of the CM-2 system and was instrumental in the development of a macro programming language for the vector processors of the CM-5. Since then, Dr. Dahl has provided development support for management and optimization of high data volume and high complexity decision support systems at a variety of companies (Teradata, eBay, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America). He joined D-Wave Systems in 2012.