Through 20 years of software experience, Neal has focused on optimizing business needs, successfully applying data mining algorithms and scalable systems in order to create advanced software products. Before his current role Neal served as the Chief Scientist at Rubicon Project, leading the development of the company’s industry-leading unified auction and associated yield algorithms that optimize revenue across billions of daily transactions. He has been a key contributor to the industry’s OpenRTB protocol which has allowed for the standardization of programmatic across the digital advertising space. He joined Rubicon Project in 2009 via the acquisition of the audience optimization company, Others Online, where he worked on their audience analytics system. Prior to Others Online, Neal worked at RightNow Technologies on self-learning search and sentiment analysis engines for CRM and was awarded 8 patents for his work.

When not sifting through petabytes of data, Neal enjoys fly fishing and raising his family in the Rockies. Neal grew up in a log cabin in Montana and holds a PhD in Computer Science from Montana State University. He specialized in and published 16 academic papers on Artificial Intelligence and optimization algorithms.