Paul Dagum, MD PhD

CEO & Co-founder

Paul is an entrepreneur, physician and computer scientist with a track record of innovation in healthcare, cybersecurity and supply chain over four successful venture-backed companies as founder, CSO, CTO and CEO. He has published 80+ peer-reviewed articles and been awarded 20+ patents in computer science and medicine. Paul has served as Applied Cognition’s CEO since its inception and is the inventor of the company’s investigational device and platform that noninvasively measures glymphatic function in humans.

​

Prior to Applied Cognition, Paul developed and patented continuous digital biomarkers of central-nervous system function using algorithms from patterns of human-computer smartphone interaction. Paul conceived and led two large multiyear clinical studies to validate the digital biomarkers against neurocognitive gold-standard tests. Paul’s prior company Mindstrong used these sensitive measures of changes in cognition to deliver virtual care to people with serious mental illness.

​

While leading NSF-funded research and completing medical school and residency at Stanford, Paul made several significant contributions to AI: he developed Dynamic Bayesian Networks that proved to be foundational for a wide range of applications and are still used today in speech recognition, digital forensics, protein sequencing and robotics. During this same period, Paul proved several foundational results in probabilistic reasoning on Bayesian networks, the representational models used in Bayesian deep learning approaches today. In 2008 Paul developed and patented the first high-performance distributed relational data system on a map-reduce architecture (“SQL on Hadoop”) and led its release as the open source project Cloudbase. Today SQL on Hadoop is offered by global database and big data infrastructure companies, and is used widely to solve some of the hardest big-data science problems.

​

Paul received an M.D. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and M.Sc. in Physics both from the University of Toronto.

Jake Winebaum

Executive Chairman & Co-founder

Jake is a serial entrepreneur with a decade-long interest in using connected devices and data to improve health and athletic performance and a history of converting his interests into successful companies across a wide range of industries from media to healthcare.

​

Prior to Applied Cognition, Jake served as Cigna’s Chief Digital Officer after its 2017 acquisition of Brighter, the healthcare company he founded seven years prior. Jake co-founded the internet incubator eCompanies, which launched among others: Boingo Wireless (IPO), JAMDAT Mobile (IPO), and Business.com (acquired by RH Donnelly) where Jake served as CEO from 2002 until its sale in 2007.

​

Prior to that Jake was President of Disney Online, overseeing all of Disney’s internet businesses including Disney.com, ABCNews.com, and ESPN.com. Jake started at Disney after it acquired the magazine FamilyFun that he founded with his wife, Cindy.

​

Jake has been the recipient of several awards in the venture and entrepreneurship space: E&Y’s Technology Entrepreneur of the Year, Time magazine Top 50 Cyber Elite, Wired magazine’s Wired 25, and the Los Angeles Venture Association’s Hall of Fame. He serves on the board of directors of the optometry nonprofit organization Vision to Learn.

Jake received his bachelor’s in Biology from Dartmouth College.