Biography
Entrepreneur, Technologist, Developer, Innovator, Mentor, STEM Coach. Founder @OpenConf, Zakon Group. CompEng&Sci @CWRU.
Robert Zakon is a technologist and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in innovating and applying emerging technologies across the intelligence, defense, health care, and scientific sectors. Born in Brazil and educated in the US since high school, he is a graduate of The Peddie School and Case Western Reserve University where he earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and Science with concentrations in Philosophy and Psychology.
Robert’s work spans a wide array of technologies and supporting disciplines, including cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, multilingual computing, systems engineering, networking, human-computer interfaces, cloud computing, and the Internet. Robert is the CTO of Zakon Group LLC and founder of OpenConf. He was formerly a Principal Engineer and Internet Evangelist with MITRE, and co-founder of SoftZoo. Among his accomplishments is the first integration of language translation with the web, engineering of the highest wi-fi link in the northeast US, and conceptualization and development of one of the first corporate intranets.
Recognized for his work through numerous commendations, Robert has also been elected an IEEE Senior Member and ACSA Senior Fellow. Among his other activities, he volunteers as a business mentor with SCORE, coaches an award-winning robotics competition team of public school students, authors Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, and serves on the board of advisors for an angel investment group providing start-up and growth capital to high-tech businesses.
Robert resides in the Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire (the Live Free and Start state) with his lovely wife and two wondrous sons.
