Professor Boris Stilman (Ph.D. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, National Research Institute for Electrical Engineering, Moscow, 1984; M.S. in Mathematics, Moscow State University, 1972) is the company's Chairman & CEO and a Founder of Stilman Advanced Strategies, Since 1991. Boris has been a Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver (UCD). Dr. Stilman is the originator of Linguistic Geometry (LG), a new type of game theory, which resulted from his research over the last 30 years. He is an internationally known scientist in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He made fundamental contributions in the areas of higher-dimensional multi-agent concurrent games, game constructors, and software development environments. He has published several books and contributions to books, over 160 journal and conference papers. The first scholarly book on LG, "Linguistic Geometry: From Search to Construction", by Dr. Stilman was published in February of 2000. Boris has given numerous invited presentations and tutorials on LG all around the world and organized major national and international research meetings. Dr. Stilman has been a recipient of numerous research awards. In the 70s and 80s, he received substantial grants from the former USSR Academy of Sciences, Control Data Corp. (USA), Universities of Mannheim and Dortmund (West Germany). Dr. Stilman is a recipient of all the top research awards at UCD, the 1998 Researcher of the Year, the 1997 Chancellor's Lecturership Award, and the 1997 Research Fellowship Award. His research on LG was supported by substantial grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR, through Phillips Laboratory), Department of Energy (DOE, through Sandia National Laboratories), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through Rockwell Science Center (RSC). His role as the world leader in LG was the key to getting US contracts for STILMAN from DARPA, Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), Missile Defense Agency (MDA), Air Force, Army, Navy, Boeing, Rockwell, as well as international contracts from Ministry of Defence (UK), BAe SYSTEMS (UK) and Fujitsu (Japan). Dr. Stilman has led a number of national projects in the former Soviet Union, government-funded projects at UCD in the USA, and all the government and commercial projects developed by STILMAN.
In the USA, many research-oriented start-ups are the university spin-offs. I will describe the process of creation, survival, and subsequent take-off of such companies on example of STILMAN Advanced Strategies, the company created in 1999 based on my research in Artificial Intelligence and Game Theory. Intelligent software tools developed at STILMAN for the US Army are currently considered vital for the US national defense. I will compare roles of investors, competitive government contracts, large businesses, and foreign sources in obtaining working capital for small companies. I will describe the US government system of competitive awards, especially, in defense, including SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) as well as those from the federal agencies such as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Agency), AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory), etc. I will provide details of the relationship of a university and spin-off businesses. I will pay special attention to the role of customers in developing new problem domains, theoretical ideas, and turning those ideas into working systems.
