Brian Chee

Born and raised in Hawaii, Brian was born Buddhist, raised Episcopalian and educated Catholic and considers himself color blind when it comes to ethnicity, religion or whatever. He actually started into cryptography early in high school and continued a trend towards systems integration working towards a degree in computer engineering.

His career wandered all over the place, but with a common theme of systems integration and troubleshooting. He became one of the first ten Certified Netware Instructors in the world (outside of Novell Inc) and then moved on to become a Printer Produce Interfacing Specialist with Xerox. Somewhere after working for a few network integration companies, he was recruited by the US General Services Administration Office of Information Security. The next decade was mostly classified work fixing broken projects and handling projects where his generalist background won him several achievement awards. It was during this time that he founded the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory (ANCL) at the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii. It took an attorney general's finding, but approval was obtained to work for GSA-OIS while stationed at the University of Hawaii while writing unclassified articles for InfoWorld Magazine and classified articles for the US government. It was at ANCL that an internship program was created to give Computer Science students a glimpse into the real world of Information Technology to balance out the ivory tower education. The students worked on giant product reviews with InfoWorld and the best of the bunch would accompany Brian to the Interop trade show to help build the world's largest temporary network which was the InteropNET. After way too much travel to way too many odd places, he retired from government service to become a researcher at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) where he provided IT integration consulting for various research groups. Including the Aloha Cabled Observatory to become the world's deepest underwater observatory (unmanned) with the ability to plug in various experiments providing both power and data communications over the retired AT&T HAW-4 undersea cable.

Now retired from both federal and state government services, he resides in Orlando, Florida to tinker as part of the planning committee for Maker Faire Orlando and is now serving on the board of directors for the Central Florida Fairgrounds.