One of the perhaps unusual aspects of the way I've chosen to organize this vitae is that I have not (artificially) compartmentalized the academic, business, and spiritual vitae. Everything is interleaved, just as in life itself.

brief biography

Ph.D., computer science, Stanford University. Dissertation: Knowledge-Based Circuit Design (435 pages). Dissertation committee: Prof. Bruce Buchanan (Chair), Prof. Terry Winograd, Dr. Mark Stefik, and Dr. Harold Brown.

B.A., computer science (summa cum laude), Columbia University.
Advisor: Prof. Jonathan Gross

	Columbia University		Jonathan Gross

Spent freshman year at Princeton University.

	Princeton University

Altar boy with the Catholic Church.

Educated at home from an early age, by parents who were both mathematics professors.

	Chris with a calculus book

Author of the 25-book The Practical Spirituality Series.

The intention of this series is to cover all the basic questions of spiritual seekers, including:

• Why do we suffer? What can we do to be happy? Is it possible to be perfectly happy? What, in spiritual terms, is the root of our un-happiness, from moment to moment? If change of circumstances (wealth; fame; a desired career; a loving partner, children, and friends; etc.) doesn’t guarantee happiness (and this is clear from the records of the wealthy, the famous, the successful, and even the loved), then what does? What spiritual means are available for restoring us to happiness?
  
  
• What can we do about the fact of our own mortality? What does happen after we die? In what way -- precisely -- does how we live impact what happens to us after we die? What is the best way to live in order to serve tangible spiritual growth, as well as our destiny after death?
  
  
• Is it possible to go beyond just talk of (and belief in) God and a Greater Reality, and actually have direct experience of that Greater Reality? Does God exist? Why are we not aware of God right now? How do we actually find God for real? How can we stay in communion with the Divine Being under any circumstance? What is God really like? How can we know God directly?
  
  
• What is the nature of the Greater Reality? How do the various teachings and Realizations of shamans, saints, yogis, and Spiritual Masters relate to each other and to the actual nature of Reality? Is it actually true that all paths to God are equal? Or are there real differences among religions and Spiritual paths that are important for us to know about in order to find the most beneficial Spiritual means? What is the greatest Spiritual potential and destiny we can realize, and what means is available for realizing it? Why aren't such Spiritual means more generally known or more widely practiced?

Director, The Institute for Real God.

The Institute for Real God was created for the purpose of making genuine spirituality and spiritual practice accessible to as many people as possible. It offers a genuine alternative to the most familiar options of our time: materialism, belief-based religion, and "new age" spirituality. In particular, The Institute for Real God:

• provides education about the insufficiency of non-spiritual means for achieving true and lasting happiness for individuals; and about the process of tangibly connecting to the Divine Being -- how it has been done traditionally, and how it best can be done now.
  
  
• provides education about the insufficiency of non-spiritual means (e.g., political, social, or military), in themselves, for creating a true and lasting world peace or world order; and education about how to draw the Divine Power into this otherwise mad world, by converting every aspect of one's own life.

President, Enchanted Websites , Host Your Site, and Register Your Domain Name

In 1994, Chris began applying his twenty years of experience on the Internet to the design and marketing of websites. This led him to create Enchanted Websites, Chris has led a small staff of friendly professionals in designing, upgrading, and marketing over seventy commercial and not-for-profit websites, as well as providing state-of-the-art web hosting and domain name services for hundreds of domain names and websites via Host Your Site, the web hosting branch of Enchanted Websites, and Register Your Domain Name, the domain name services branch of Enchanted Websites.

Some of these sites have won recognition for the quality of their design (including an excellent review from the #1 newstand web magazine, "The Web", and a feature on MSNBC's nationally broadcast program, "The Site"). Others have had traffic to their site increased by more than tenfold through Enchanted Websites' state-of-the-art online marketing techniques.

Enchanted Websites has provided web services for organizations as well-known and diverse as:

• Kaiser Permanente, the #1 non-profit HMO in the United States;
• Adrien Arpel (stock market ticker symbol: ADPL), one of the most recognized and respected names in skin care in the world;
• Barbara's Bakery, the #1 manufacturer of natural cold cereals in the United States;
• Name That Toon, the #1 publisher of advertising animation art in the world;
• Color Me Beautiful, the internationally acclaimed cosmetic line (and bestselling book) that revolutionized the world of color cosmetics by introducing the concept of choosing color by season;
• Villas International, the 2nd oldest international vacation rental company in the United States;
• Bright Lights Candle Company, the 3rd best-selling candle manufacturer in the Northeastern United States;
• Ed Kowalczyk, the lead singer of the rock band Live, whose recent album, Secret Samadhi, debuted at the #1 position on the Billboard charts, and who was featured at the end of the recent box office hit, The Mummy Returns, performing the theme song.
• Ray Lynch, the 3-time Billboard Award winner, and platinum album composer of the 1st New Age gold album, Deep Breakfast;
• Christine Feehan, author of the "Dark" series romance novels,which have made both The New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists
• The Paperweight Collectors Association, the #1 not-for-profit organization in the world for paperweight collectors;
• Gale Hayman Beverly Hills, whose products are formulated by Gale Hayman, longtime beauty consultant to celebrities that have included Princess Grace and Barbra Streisand;
• Iman Cosmetics and Skincare, whose products are formulated by supermodel, Iman, and are among the best-recognized among women of color.

Enchanted Websites has also been recognized by its peers. The company is regularly contracted by other web companies, including Meridian West, The Mews Group, Computer Adept, Natural Net Marketing, Natural Health Yellow Pages, and Fred Rohé Marketing Solutions. It is one of only two companies recommended by Americart, one of the world's leading e-commerce service providers. Enchanted Websites is also a member of the International Webmasters Association.

Visiting researcher, Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

	MIT (photo by Liang-Wu Cai)

Visiting scientist, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY (Dr. Se June Hong, manager)

	Se June Hong		IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, and Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty, Rutgers University.

	Hill Center, Rutgers University

Consultant, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Knowledge Systems Area (with Dr. Lynn Conway and Dr. Mark Stefik).

	Lynn Conway		Mark Stefik

Consultant, Knowledge Systems Laboratory (Prof. Ed Feigenbaum, Prof. Bruce Buchanan, directors) of the Stanford University Computer Science Department.

Summer Research Associate, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center (Mathematical Sciences Dept. with Dr. Robert Brayton)

Even though Chris is not registered with any particular political party, he was honored by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) when it selected him for its 2002 National Leadership Award. At the same time, he was pleased to accept the NRCC's appointment as the Special Advisor to the Chairman on the NRCC's Business Advisory Council.

Members of the Business Advisory Council are selected after an exhaustive search of key business leaders throughout the United States. Appointments and awards are based on the following criteria:

• Successful entrepreneurial skills
• Commitment to conservative business principles
• Leadership skills in business management
• Communication skills for proactively conveying ideas to Congressional leaders
• Cooperative attitude and ability to generate positive working relationships

Members of the Business Advisory Council provide input to the NRCC (and thereby Congress altogether) on the needs of small businesses, particularly giving input on tax and economic issues. If you are associated with a small business and have useful input of this sort, please drop Chris a line. He welcomes this opportunity to have a positive impact on policy-making, and is very interested in hearing from, and accurately communicating the needs of, the American small business community.

The series, "Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design" (Chris Tong and Ram Duvurru Sriram, editors) was named to the Omega 23 list of "Highly Recommended Resources in Artificial Intelligence".

	Ram Duvurru Sriram

Awarded a fellowship from NL Industries, for being the outstanding graduate student of the year in the Knowledge Systems Laboratory of the Stanford University Computer Science Department. The criterion used for selection by Prof. Bruce Buchanan and Prof. Ed Feigenbaum was "the overall high quality of research, personal initiative, and potential as a young scientist."

	Ed Feigenbaum

Received honorable mentions in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, now known as the Intel Science Talent Search (high school senior).

"The Science Talent Search is the nation’s oldest and most highly-regarded science competition. The STS has identified young scientific talent with remarkable precision: alumni include five Nobel Laureates, ten MacArthur Foundation Fellows, and two Fields Medalists."

from the Intel Science Talent Search website

Co-author (with Thomas Gass) of, and actor in, "Number 33", a play about a man searching for (but never finding) true happiness, selected as the performance for showcasing student talent at the National Honor Society induction ceremony (high school senior).

	scene from "Number 33"

Chris Tong, Appreciating the DIFFERENCES Among Religions, Paths, and Revelations, Part 3: The Sacred Earth: Realization of the Magical, Psycho-Physical Dimensions. The Practical Spirituality Press, May, 2001 (145 pages).

Chris Tong, Appreciating the DIFFERENCES Among Religions, Paths, and Revelations, Part 2: Three Views of Reality and Human Potential. The Practical Spirituality Press, February, 2001 (108 pages).

Ashok Goel, Tom Bylander, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Tom Dietterich, Richard Keller, and Chris Tong. "Knowledge Compilation: A Symposium". IEEE Expert [now known as IEEE Intelligent Systems], 6(2):71-93, April 1991. article

	Rich Keller		Chandra		Tom Bylander

Chris Tong. A Divide-and-Conquer Approach to Knowledge Compilation. Chapter 11 of Michael Lowry and Robert D. McCartney, editors, Automating Software Design. AAAI Press, 1991.

	Robert McCartney

Chris Tong, "Knowledge-Based Design as an Engineering Science: the Rutgers AI / Design Project" (invited paper). Applications of AI in Engineering V, Vol. 1: Design, John Gero (Ed.), Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Appl. of AI in Eng., Boston, MA, Computational Mechanics Publications & Springer-Verlag, 1990, pp. 297-319.

	John Gero

Chris Tong, On compiling explainable models of a design domain. In Tom Mitchell, Jaime Carbonell, and Ryszard Michalski (editors), Machine Learning: A Guide to Current Research. Kluwer, 1986. pp. 343-347.

	Ryszard Michalski

Chris Tong. KBSDE: An Environment For Developing Knowledge-Based Design Tools. In Tom Dietterich, editor, Proceedings of the Workshop on Knowledge Compilation, pp. 127-138, Oregon State Univ., September 1986.

	Tom Dietterich

Mark Stefik, Daniel Bobrow, Alan Bell, Harold Brown, Lynn Conway, and Chris Tong, "The partitioning of concerns in digital system design", Proceedings of the Conference on Advanced Research in VLSI, MIT, Artech House, January 1982. (Also Xerox report VLSI-81-3, pp. 43-52, December 1981.) [the paper: pdf file]

	Danny Bobrow		Alan Bell

Robert Brayton and Chris Tong, Stability of Dynamical Systems: A Constructive Approach. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, April 1979. (widely cited paper, e.g., [1], [2], [3] )

	Bob Brayton

Tutorial on Artificial Intelligence and Design, co-presenter (with Lou Steinberg), at the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-88).

	Lou Steinberg

Guest editor (with Peter Hart) for IEEE Expert [now known as IEEE Intelligent Systems], special issue on AI Applications, Fall, 1990.

	Peter Hart

"Knowledge Compilation: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach". National Science Foundation. Principal Investigator. $623,118.
Other investigators: Dr. Tom Ellman

	Tom Ellman

"AI and Design: Computer-Aided Productivity". DARPA / Nasa Ames Research Center. Investigator. $2,274,444.
Principal Investigator: Prof. Saul Amarel

	Saul Amarel

"A Domain-Independent Model of Knowledge-Based Design". DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), Co-proposer and Investigator. $2,765,715.
Other investigators: Prof. Lou Steinberg and Prof. Jack Mostow

	The Rutgers AI / VLSI Project (Lou Steinberg, Chris Tong, and Jack Mostow): At the untamed frontier where Artificial Intelligence and human design meet

"A Domain-Independent Model of Knowledge-Based Design". National Science Foundation, Co-proposer and Investigator. $587,000.
Other investigators: Prof. Lou Steinberg and Prof. Jack Mostow

	Jack Mostow

"Artificial Intelligence Aids for VLSI Design". DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Investigator. $1,293,945.
Other investigators: Prof. Tom Mitchell, Prof. Lou Steinberg, and Prof. Jack Mostow

	Tom Mitchell

Sunil Mohan. Dissertation: Two Approaches to the Hierarchical Solution of Constraint Satisfaction Problems.

Dr. Mohan is currently working on automating mission scheduling for space-based observatories, in the Mission Operations Scheduling Project, at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA.

	Sunil Mohan and his wife

Kerstin Voigt. Dissertation: Automating Software Design for Resource Assignment Problems.

Dr. Voigt is currently an associate professor and the Graduate Coordinator for Admissions in the Department of Computer Science at California State University in San Bernadino. She is the head of the Intelligent Agents Research Group, and is a member of the Software Engineering Research Group.

	Kerstin Voigt, Chris Tong, and Nobel Prize-winning researcher, Herb Simon

Wes Braudaway. Dissertation: Knowledge Compilation for Incorporating Constraints.

Dr. Braudaway is a staff member at SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) in Orlando, Florida. He is the manager and chief scientist of the ADS Research Team (a joint effort by SAIC and The Asset Group), which conducts applied research and development in modeling and simulation.

	Wes Braudaway