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Who

Flashsear.net is Aaron Brown, 40-something computer scientist and avid amateur musician, chef, and photographer, currently living in San Francisco, CA. I am not a news anchor for CNN. I spend my days as a senior product director at Google, where I've worked on a range of consumer and enterprise products from search to healthcare to developer tools and infrastructure.

For more on my professional background, see my LinkedIn page. If you're looking for my pre-Google research and publications, see my research page for more details.

I grew up near Boston, MA, went to high school in Cambridge, and decided to stick around the area to attend college at Harvard. I arrived back on the east coast in New York in 2004, after a 7-year sojurn to Berkeley, CA, where I picked up a PhD from UC Berkeley, met some wonderful friends, discovered the joys of fresh produce, rediscovered photography, lamented the lack of real seasons, and all in all learned a lot about myself. In 2013 I returned to the west coast to plant my long-term roots, and currently live in San Francisco.

These days work keeps me pretty busy, but I try to find time to keep up with my other interests. A big part of my life is filled by music--I've been playing violin since before I was 4 years old, and for many years was the concertmaster of the Prometheus Symphony, a community orchestra based in Oakland, CA. I continue to play today with groups in the SF Bay Area.

I'm also an avid amateur chef, baker, and self-professed lover of great food; I love to cook and to seek out new and interesting restaurants and cuisines. I even once took part in a mock Iron Chef battle (back before Iron Chef was the Food Network-powered phenomenon it is today)--a friend and I duked it out in my kitchen for two hours to see who could create the most interesting and tasty dishes out of the three surprise ingredients unveiled by a panel of our friends serving as judges: cactus, bison, and leeks. Now that's a challenge! (For the record, I came up with cactus paddles stuffed with jack cheese, breaded, fried, and served over a tomato sauce; a leek tart; and pan-seared bison steaks accompanied by mushroom-cognac sauce, roasted new potatoes, haricots verts, and creamy oven-braised leeks.)

Finally, I've always been fascinated with the art of photography, and returned to it after a long hiatus as the digital revolution made it possible to have the power of a darkroom without the physical need for one. I work with an Olympus/OM-1 micro-four-thirds system. I post pictures on Facebook and Instagram, and you can see some of my older albums in this site's archived photo galleries.

Contact

The best way to reach me is by e-mail:

Or you can connect with me on Medium, Facebook, or Twitter @aaron_b_brown.

Last updated: 24-Aug-2022