Danilo Gasques, Ph.D.

People buy amazing products and get a PDF. They scrub through a 40-minute YouTube video to find the 30 seconds they need. They email support and wait. We thought that was broken.

Ruby was the manual killer. Ruby saw through the customer's camera, responded with contextual video, and adapted to their exact setup — like having the product's best engineer standing right there. We took it to private beta.

Ruby was AppliedMind's first product — expert knowledge in the moment, applied to the post-purchase customer experience.

I've spent a decade on one question: how do you close the gap between what an expert knows and what a novice can do?

At UC San Diego, I built ARTEMIS, a mixed-reality system that let remote surgeons guide novices through procedures they'd never performed — deployed at Naval Medical Center San Diego on cadavers. My PhD research argued that the right contextual cues make even imperfect guidance useful — you don't need perfect hardware, you need the right design. At Medivis, I led situated ultrasound and took prostate navigation from inception to FDA submission.

Last year, I joined South Park Commons as a Founder Fellow (F25) to build the next big thing in AI + physical tasks. AppliedMind, the company I co-founded there, is winding down — and I'm heads-down on what's next.