SMITH, Russell Leigh

1972 -  (52 years)

• Name	SMITH, Russell Leigh
  Birth	19 Jul 1972	Wellington, New Zealand
  Gender	Male
  Person ID	I00013	Walkley Tree
  Last Modified	1 Jul 2016

  
  

  Father	SMITH, Vernon Leigh,   b. 24 Jul 1940, Westmere, Auckland (Age 84 years)
  Relationship	natural
  Mother	WARD, Sally Lowe,   b. 15 Mar 1944, Auckland (Age 81 years)
  Relationship	natural
  Marriage	17 Apr 1971	Orewa, North Auckland
  Family ID	F00010	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	CHOU, Novey Yu-Lan,   b. 26 Aug 1974, Taiwan (Age 50 years)
  Marriage	02 Jun 2002	Half Moon Bay, California, United States of America
  Divorce	2022
  Children	1. SMITH, Calvin Kai-Wen,   b. 22 Jan 2004, El Camino Hospital, Mountain View, California, USA (Age 21 years)  [Father: natural]  [Mother: natural]   2. SMITH, Owen Kai-Shiang,   b. 16 Feb 2007, Santa Clara, California, USA (Age 18 years)  [Father: natural]  [Mother: natural]
  Family ID	F00011	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	14 Dec 2023

  
  

• Notes

  I was born in Wellington on July 19, 1972. I grew up in Massey, West Auckland, where I attended Royal Road Primary School and then Massey High School. After that I followed my father's footsteps into the electrical engineering program at the University of Auckland. After I obtained a Bachelor of Engineering in early 1994 I went into the electrical engineering post-graduate program, where I worked on "intelligent" motion control problems for walking robots (see http://q12.org/phd.html). I graduated with a PhD in 1998. As the New Zealand job market did not have much need for my specialized skills, I moved to Montreal, Canada, where I worked for a start-up company called Lateral Logic that made simulators for industrial machines. Within a year Lateral Logic was bought by Math Engine, a UK start-up specializing in physics engine software for computer games. In late 1999 I met my wife Novey, who was living in Manchester, New Hampshire at the time. Over the next six months I spent almost every weekend taking the bus or driving a rental car from Montreal down to New Hampshire and back, occasionally driving through blizzard conditions. In September 2000 I officially immigrated to the US, becoming the one-man New Hampshire branch of Math Engine. Math Engine folded soon after (another dot com victim). To keep up my visa status in the US I took a job with Ubicom in California, where a grad-school friend of mine was working. So in May 2001, Novey quit her job at Compaq, we packed everything we had into a U-haul trailer and drove across the U.S. in ten days. This is one of our most memorable trips. We settled in Mountain View, California. In June of 2002 we were married at Half Moon Bay, on the chilly California coast. In 2004 our first son was born, Calvin Kai-Wen Smith. In mid 2006 I left Ubicom for Google, where I now work on the Street View feature of Google Maps. In 2007 our second son was born, Owen, Kai-Shiang Smith. In early 2009, after years of immigration paperwork, I finally became a U.S. citizen (though I get to keep my Kiwi citizenship too!). Russ Smith http://www.q12.org/