Rick Kwan is acting communications director, or ... how shall we say... "minister of propaganda" of the AIAA San Francisco Section, a contributing webmaster for the section website, and was the section chair during the 2005-2006 term. He is an AIAA Associate Fellow, and a member of the AIAA Computer Systems Technical Committee.
His professional background draws from both the computing and aerospace industries. His major aerospace interests include: astrodynamics, trajectory modeling, and computing in flight. His computing interests include: computing architectures, high-end embedded systems (the type that have MMUs and kernel/user separation), and open source software. He currently works for a major Silicon Valley software powerhouse in the are of "virtual machine" technology, and previously worked on high-end consumer electronics. He has been involved with Linux/UNIX development work for roughly 30 years.
From 2001 to 2003, he worked as a contractor at NASA Ames on software supporting air traffic management for the National Air Space (NAS). During this period, he spent an extensive amount of personal time talking with instrument-rated pilots, and getting their perspective of the NAS.
Before that, he spent over a decade in the Silicon Valley computing industry. At NetPhonic Communications, he helped develop a telephonically driven web browser, was deeply entrenched in web standards and protocols of the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and made small contributions into the W3C Protocol Reference Library. For several years he was, a software engineer or engineering manager at Sun Microsystems, doing work on multi-lingual aspects of Solaris. He also spent a short period at another Silicon Valley company a hardware engineer supporting the physical layout process of VLSI CAD.
From 1986 to 1989, he worked in Taiwan and helped start chip design house Acer Laboratories, Inc. (ALI), served as its ASIC CAD manager, and learned the intricacies of VLSI design. In the process, he became familiar with full-custom CMOS design.
During the late 1970s and early/mid 1980s, he worked in the Los Angeles area for companies such as System Development Corporation (satellite ephemeris software verification, speech recognition), Hughes Aircraft Company (Radar System Group engineering computing center), and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (lab test set for Magellan).
Mr. Kwan has been a member of AIAA since the early 1970s, when he was a student member. He is a co-inventor on two software patents (U.S. Patents 5,664,206 and 5,953,392).
Now... if you're in the mood for a good story, here it is...
In 1998, he founded Lightsaber Computing, Inc., a consulting firm focusing on UNIX and Linux systems, considered by many to be "Not as clumsy or as random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age." It has also looked into long-range concepts in computing, particularly the shape of networked computing resources to come.
By some accounts, it was a tremor in the Force which led him to lightsaber.com. He was looking for a more conventional name, and had exhausted several permutations. Virtually all popular names were already registered. He was then shocked into stunned silience to find that lightsaber.com was available, and deliberated for several days before taking the name. This was the second time he had backed into a Star Wars-related name.
Years before, after exhausting sensible usernames at Sun, he reached for the outlandish name kenobi, and was granted it. Naturally, he would need a Star Wars planet for hostname, but those were all taken. He therefore settled on hostname lightsaber, and was granted that as well. (Yes, he was kenobi (at) lightsaber (dot) fill-in-the-rest (dot) com. Otherwise, we might today have a company named "Hoth Computing" or "Tatooine Computing"; then again "Coruscant Computing" might not be bad...)
Years before that, he and a co-worker did UNIX system support at System Development Corporation. His co-worker appeared to have been seduced by the dark side of the Force, and was granted the loginID vader. By contrast, an occasional student of theology and ponderer of the universe should have no other name than kenobi.
The domain name lightsaber.com initially got him into hot water with Star Wars fans who wanted to see a fan site, but later made the company site popular with them for several months when LucasFilm released Episode 1 of its Star Wars prequel. The company received numerous e-mails wanting to know how to build a lightsaber, and still get an occasional sporadic request of that sort.