Managing Directors
Dr. Daniel Alspach | Terry Bibbens | Jere Glover | Dr. Terry Rickard

Advisory Board
Dr. Neil Birch | Honorable William Lowery | Peter Wardle

Managing Director: Dr. Daniel Alspach

Dr. Daniel Alspach recently retired as Founder, President and CEO   of Orincon Corporation (1973 to July 2003), when it was acquired by Lockheed-Martin. In recent years Dr. Alspach developed the concepts for the creation of CCAT (Center for Commercialization of Advanced Technologies--see http://www.ccatsandiego.org/index.shtml ) and was instrumental in obtaining federal funding to launch this program and its sister program in San Bernardino, CA, the OTTC (Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization--see http://ottc.csusb.edu/ ). These highly successful programs came out of commercialization projects at Orincon where Alspach decided that all new commercialization projects proposed by the team must first pass through a market research screen to determine their potential in the proposed markets. Using the nationally ranked SDSU Entrepreneurial Management Center Orincon's commercialization projects successfully broadened the company's market base.

From the beginning, Orincon's mission focused on application of signal, image and information processing to real-world, real-time problems. The company started with three government contracts and rapidly became an important technology developer during the Cold War. "We helped design the SOSUS tracker system to follow the Soviet Ballistic Missile Submarine, one of the most serious threats to the United States. I was able to apply theories from my UC San Diego thesis research to the system," said Alspach. "I see this as part of the chain that ended the Cold War. The SOSUS was so successful, that the Russians had to spend tremendous amounts of money trying to quiettheir subs to avoid detection. At the same time, they spent a great deal trying to counter Reagan's Star Wars technology. This, with the inherentinefficiencies of their socialistic economic system, broke the bank and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union."  

Alspach moved to San Diego in 1966 to work at General Atomics and pursue a Ph.D. at UC San Diego. Studying under Professor Harold Sorenson, Alspach developed theories of nonlinear estimation of stochastic control. "Humans gather signals from sensors--ears, eyes, and nose-- process these signals, draw conclusions, create a world view, and act on that model to satisfy needs and gather more information about what the world is really like. And we do it all in an environment that is constantly changing," said Alspach. "As engineers, we use algorithms built in software and run in multiprocessor computers to do these same kinds of functions in real time. Our research at UC San Diego was some of the first to use nonlinear estimation to adapt control systems in changing and complex environments." Orincon had an unusually high percentage of technical staff with Ph.D. and MS degrees. Dr. Alspach guided this team of highly talented technologists to achieve remarkable results in the intelligence community and with considerable pride in the financial accomplishments of Orincon. He is a board member of Metal Storm, an Australian defense company. He is a board member of the Small Business Technology Coalition (SBTC), the primary trade organization supporting the SBIR program. He can be reached at Dan.Alspach@homelandvp.com