Denis Hurley
Creative Technologist
I’m an agile, creative generalist, a self-taught technologist, and a perpetually curious problem-solver. I'm passionate about applying emerging technologies to improve the health and wellness of our cities and their inhabitants. I'm particularly excited about how spatial (XR) and Web3 technologies may be used together to solve persistent, real-world problems.
Some of the things I've done:
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BeSync is a novel method for information transfer between virtual and physical systems, bypassing information gatekeepers, and improving interoperability, discoverability, and accessibility for people and organizations.
BeSync empowers individuals and organizations to solve existing, persistent problems through an independent, lightweight data layer. BeSync provides the tools through which participants construct the framework for a practical metaverse through organic growth and grow a shared user base from known, trusted systems.
• Individuals manage their own personal data and opt-in to sharing information.
• Organizations gain interoperability, flexibility, and accessibility.
BeSync is human-driven and physical-first.
Overview
BeSync empowers individuals and organizations to solve existing, persistent problems through an independent, lightweight data layer. BeSync provides the tools through which participants construct the framework for a practical metaverse through organic growth and grow a shared user base from known, trusted systems.
Web3 Prototype
While participating in HackFS 22 hackathon, our team developed a prototype of the core technical component, the phygit, a geotemporal data layer for blockchain, using Tableland, Polygon, and Web3Storage. This hackathon was dedicated to building the decentralized Web.
Walk-Throughs
Phygits may contain information contextualized to time and location, such as historical media, from plain text to immersive experiences, available for search and discovery relative to their times and locations.
Phygits may also be used to link an asset between systems throughout its lifecycle, updating and accessing information as needed and permitted, passively or actively.
Director of Future Technologies, and
Sr. Technology Innovation Analyst
While my responsibilities evolved, my time at Pearson was dedicated to researching, teaching, and advancing emerging education technologies and in-house innovation practices.
I managed a network of approximately 250 colleagues across all lines of business, locations, and seniority levels within Pearson to collect ideas for new features and products, communicated about new technologies relevant to Pearson, stayed informed about Pearson’s lines of business, and built functioning education technology prototypes. I also organized and facilitated in-person and virtual meetups, workshops, and demonstration sessions.
In addition, I managed relationships with edtech incubators in NYC, Boston, and Washington, DC, advising start-ups and researching market trends, and established and maintained an external network of technology leaders in education and tangential industries and explored potential candidates for partnerships and collaborations.
I represented Pearson and presented my work as a keynote speaker at the Wearable Technology (London), the ICT Congress (Cartagena, Colombia), and EdTech Sweden (Stockholm). I also co-hosted five episodes of the FutureTech for Education series on the EdTech Podcast and maintained an external network of technology leaders in education and tangential industries, exploring potential candidates for partnerships and collaborations.
Rapid Prototyping
With our small team of developers and designers, I completed over a dozen prototypes and research projects using a wide variety of emerging technologies, including VR, AR, affective computing, IoT, maker learning, 21st century skills, and more.
“Denis is easily one of, if not the best supervisors I have had the opportunity to work for. Denis hired me as an intern and helped me grow into a full-time role. He is an extremely supportive and motivating manager. His intelligence and ability to think far forward into the future inspired our team and others to find new, exciting, and profitable opportunities for Pearson."
Elyssa Miller
Director of Customer Success - Digital at Credly
This VR prototype immerses children in a simulated environment – such as a classroom or hallway – while a narrator explains the situation of the protagonist, Charlie. Through the Oculus Rift, they experience the bullying of the protagonist from a first-person perspective and is coached by a trained parent, teacher or psychologist who is outside of the virtual world, but present in the room. In the world of psychology, this type of intervention is known as “immersion therapy.”
Project Belvedere is an exploration into how users interact with wearable devices and a three week-long study with five higher-ed students. StudentCare gauges a college student’s physical and emotional well-being and displays the results to administrators through a dashboard.
Rapid Plus is an iOS application developed by the future technologies team at Pearson. The prototype combines content designed to help children with dyslexia and Spritz’s speed-reading technology.
Innovation Champions
For the Uniminuto conference in Bogotá, Colombia, I presented on how and why the Future Technologies teams works with our colleagues from around the globe to explore the use of emerging technologies for educational and learning tools.
Public Engagement
“I had the pleasure of working with Denis Hurley at EdTechSweden 2017. Denis was requested by the conference as a main speaker, an extremely prestigious spot, based on his talks and printed work on VR and Augmented Reality. He was very engaged and generous with his time and on his visit was willing to meet several universities and start-ups to sharing information on new technologies at Pearson and across the EdTech space. His talks were not only fact filled but engaging and dynamic. His energy level is unparalleled landing on the ground and going right to work! Denis continues to support our understanding of new developments in the field with his blog posts and invitations to targeted online technology sessions with speakers and development discussions. Denis is a great resource and works easily across various partners and departments and has a very broad view of the U.S and global markets.”
Kristine Markels Ängeby
Digital Strategy & Implementation Nordics, Pearson
For the opening keynote of EdTech Sweden, I prepared a summary of the technologies that are most integral to learning during the Age of Exponential Technologies and an overview of how the workforce is changing as we enter the Fourth Wave of The Industrial Revolution.
Shortly after the mobile web began to take off, I designed and developed several tools for small to medium-sized businesses to create and maintain a smartphone-optimized mobile web presence to attract and retain customers. These included mobile and location-based applications for restaurants, shops, food trucks, bed & breakfasts, musicians, and more.
“Denis is obviously knowledgeable and works on the cutting edge of high technology. However, he has the ability to explain his work to non-technical people in a way they can understand. This and his conscientiousness are valuable traits that benefit him and those he works with. Denis is able to identify a technical problem and deliver a solution. For example, I worked with Denis as a Mobile Meteor agency partner. It was a profitable business experience bringing his technology cross country to California. We were applying mobile web apps to our website clients allowing their websites to be read on mobile phones. This was well before responsive design came along."
Alan Armijo
President – iTrust Marketing
Mobile Meteor began as a tool to quickly create mobile-optimized websites to be redirected from unfriendly sites. These sites also incorporated emerging social media tools that small businesses began to use for marketing.
I began a partner program and gave system access to individuals across the country who supported small businesses directly, such as through business improvement districts or business associations.
In cities across North America, food trucks exploded in popularity. But there was a problem: they operated much like traditional restaurants but often with multiple, mobile locations. Many relied on tweeting, while Twitter was often down and did not have many active users. Mobile Meteor's solution included maps in the business's websites and social media pages. Locations were maintained by the truck operators via Mobile Meteor location-based tool, web-based tool, or Twitter and stored in a central repository for searchability, discoverability, and reliability.
After designing and developing bnbfinder's, location-based inn-finder, I created a version of Mobile Meteor specifically for bed & breakfasts and inns.
I served as client and implementation manager of Mercado CSN for eight large customers, including Ethan Allen, B&H Photo, Diapers.com, and Overstock. Assisted with the integration of analytics (Omniture & Coremetrics) and reviews (BazaarVoice). I also developed a versatile, standalone mobile web solution to enable eCommerce customers to easily access mCommerce consumers. This was a tightly-knit startup with about eight versatile folks. I learned a lot about ecommerce, databases, and the impossibility of interoperability.
After working as a developer and managing small teams in the New York City office, I relocated to Sydney, Australia. The HR Portal, which I had helped design, was widely used in Aon's Asia-Pacific market. In addition to supporting this product, I managed a 17-person development team, supporting applications maintained in over a dozen different technical languages. I was also instrumental in unifying two teams from an in-house IT merger, resulting in one harmonious unit with increased productivity.
After joining this 2-week old startup as a graphic designer, I learned several coding languages in order to design a new web portal for the system, greatly improving security and introducing customizability. The startup was acquired by Aon, and the HR Portal was eventually used by over 100,000 people.
