Frank Kschischang and the Future of Engineering Impact

Earlier this month, the University of Toronto named Frank Kschischang a University Professor — the institution’s most distinguished academic rank, held by fewer than 2% of tenured faculty. Unless you work in information theory or error-correcting codes, you’ve probably never heard of him.

You’ve almost certainly used his work.

The Invisible Layer #

Kschischang co-created factor graphs, a mathematical framework for representing and computing with complex probabilistic relationships. If that sentence made your eyes glaze over, let me put it differently: factor graphs are a foundational tool used in error-correcting codes that make your wireless communications work, in the LDPC decoders inside your WiFi chipset, and in the probabilistic models that underpin a growing chunk of robotics and machine learning.

PadCare Labs: AI for Social Impact Case Study

I spend most of my time thinking about developer tools, APIs, and cloud infrastructure. Interesting problems, sure. Life-changing? Not exactly. Every once in a while, though, I come across a use of technology that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place.

PadCare Labs is an Indian startup that processes menstrual hygiene waste. Not a glamorous pitch. Not the kind of thing that gets covered at major tech conferences. But the engineering behind it is solid — and the social impact is real in ways that most “AI for good” marketing copy only pretends to be.

Scaling Disaster Relief Response in Urban Environments

When I co-founded Doare.org in 2011, the problem felt straightforward: make it easy for people to donate to nonprofits in Brazil. We built a payment platform, partnered with hundreds of organizations, and somehow grew it into the largest donation platform for nonprofits in Latin America. (Still not entirely sure how that happened.)

What I didn’t expect—and what kept me up at night—was how much of the donation pipeline depended on knowing where the need actually was. A nonprofit could sign up on our platform, but if their outreach didn’t match where the crisis was unfolding, the money just sat there while people went hungry three neighborhoods over. Not exactly the outcome we were going for.

Building Tech for Good during Global Lockdowns

I co-founded Doare.org in 2011. It became Brazil’s largest donation platform for nonprofits — over 4,500 organizations registered, payment infrastructure built from scratch, angel funding, the whole startup lifecycle. I left in 2014, but I still think about the problems we were trying to solve.

Watching what’s happening now has brought all of that back, in a way I didn’t expect.

The Nonprofit Digital Gap #

COVID-19 didn’t create the digital gap in the nonprofit sector. It exposed it. Most nonprofits I worked with in Brazil operated on spreadsheets and personal relationships. Donor communication happened through email blasts (if you were lucky) or phone calls. Volunteer coordination meant someone with a clipboard and a lot of patience.