Publications and Lectures by Kenneth L. Hess

Kenneth L. Hess and Hugo D. Paz, “Defining a Lingua Franca to Open the Black Box of a Naïve Bayes Recommender,” arXiv:1709.07528 [cs.IR][cs:AI], 21 September 2017.

Kenneth L. Hess, Courtney J. Corda, and Kristina M. Lanese, “Science Buddies: Advancing Informal Science Education,” Science,  vol. 332, pp. 550-551, 29 April 2011.  Our essay appeared in recognition of winning the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) sponsored by the AAAS and Science magazine.

Kenneth L. Hess, Bootstrap:  Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch, S-Curve Press, 2001.

Kenneth L. Hess, Remarks to Software Forum Dinner Meeting, February 19, 1997.  My thoughts on building a company, including a checklist of questions to ask before starting, new product criteria, and things I’d do differently the second time around. I also discussed Banner Blue’s award winning web site.  (The first Web browser was released to the public in August 1991, and Banner Blue had launched its website in 1995.)

Kenneth L. Hess, Display System and Method for Constructing and Editing a Hierarchical Arrangement of Information, United States Patent 4,764,867, 1988.  This was one of the earliest software patents to be issued.  I had taken a class at Stanford from Egon Loebner, the Heuristics of Invention and Discovery,  and based on what I had learned I felt strongly that this particular work could be patented.  I consulted with Egon and he agreed; eventually, so did the U.S. Patent Office.

Kenneth L. Hess, “The Growth of Automotive Transportation,” 23 September 1984.  This essay was written for fun, but it proved to be great practice for the many strategic plans that I wrote in the organizations that I  founded.

Kenneth L. Hess, “Picking the Best Display:  An Easy to Follow Guide,” Electronic Design, pp. 139-146, 19 August 1982.  This article resulted from a task force I led at the Hewlett-Packard Optoelectronics Division, to understand the strategic strengths and weaknesses of LEDs relative to alternative technologies.