Below are the bios of the visitors from Sony who will be spending the day in the Idea Garden.

Kenji Tanaka Ph.D.,
General Manager, B2BoA, PSSGoA, Sony Electronics Inc.

Kenji Tanaka received the BE degree in mathematical engineering, the MS degree in information physics, and the Ph.D. degree in advanced interdisciplinary studies from the University of Tokyo in 1995, 1997, and 2004, respectively. As a researcher, his interests are in image processing, virtual reality devices, and panoramic stereoscopic sensors and displays. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society. He is currently with Sony Corporation, where he works on professional software and solutions. 
From 2017, he is working on solution development for North America higher education market in San Jose, California. He is in charge of the development of newer solutions and the strategic partnership with technology companies in higher education.

Cody Poultney
Senior UX Designer

Upon graduating from the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, I joined Sony as a UX Designer working on the Catalyst Production Suite. Soon after joining, I transitioned to work on a wide variety of R&D projects spanning from virtual reality to law enforcement. Most recently, I have focused primarily on helping to guide Sony's user research and product design for higher education. My goal is to create delightful user experiences by helping our teams to better understand user expectations, behaviors, and needs through user research and usability testing. 

Robert McCain
Senior Partner Engineer

Robert has been a full time developer for over 20 years working as a full LAMP stack engineer building large systems used by millions per day to a UI engineer creating interactive consoles for users and administrators for large institutions as well as creating prototypes including everything from new business functions to new entertainment based interactions. Robert also maintains several personal public projects including over 11 apps on the Google play store totaling 600,000 plus downloads, 2 3d projects on thingiverse and an open source code library on github.

Jonas Pettersson
Senior Strategic Business Development Manager

Responsible for creating new strategic relationships with companies and organizations interested in working with Sony products in the fields of projection mapping, imaging, AR and digital signage.

Steve Brenneman
Principal Software Engineer

Originally, a co-founder of a startup that through a couple of acquisitions ultimately became a part of Sony.  In total, a developer with 20 years of experience using C/C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular, Python and AWS in the creation of products ranging from multi-media desktop applications to cloud-based web applications

John Garmendi,  Strategic Business Development Manager,    
Professional Solutions Americas Sony Electronics

In this role, John manages strategic relationships between Sony Electronics and higher education institutions within the Eastern Zone of North America.

His 28-year career with Sony’s Professional division has progressed through a range of roles including Sales Support Engineer for Projection Systems, District Account Manager for Reseller Sales, National Sales Manager, Strategic Planning Manager, Broadcast Account Manager, National Account Manager Visual Simulation/Visual Entertainment and National Account Manager Broadcast Networks.

He is a member of Sony’s prestigious Samurai Society, and has also been presented with two technical Emmy awards for his work on the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. 

He holds two certifications from the Society of Broadcast Engineers: Certified Broadcast Network Technologist (CBNT) and Certified Broadcast Technology Engineer (CBTE). He also holds two certifications from the Association for Quality in Audio and Video.