Chris Watts
Co-Founder & CTO at IAB Tech Lab
Elmbridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Watts is a founder and CTO with 13 years of experience building sensor-driven AI products that boost retention and engagement for media and entertainment apps through context recognition. He blends hands-on embedded and cloud engineering — from improving MQTT client timeouts and cross-platform networking to front-end JS enhancements that add human-friendly future-date formatting — with applied machine learning for affordable environmental and healthcare sensing. After researching smart air-quality sensors and patient recovery monitoring at IBM Research, he co-founded NumberEight to commercialize scalable, privacy-aware context sensing. Active in industry standards and programmatic advertising working groups, he advises on addressability, privacy-enhancing tech, and scaling product-led teams. Based in Elmbridge, UK, he pairs Cambridge advanced computer science training with a pragmatic, open-source mindset (and a fondness for GitLab).
13 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) Advanced Computer Science, Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) Advanced Computer Science at University of CambridgeBachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science at University of SouthamptonA-Level Mathematics, A-Level Mathematics at East Norfolk Sixth Form College
English, French
Stackoverflow
6,457reputation
595kreached
41answers
95questions
gitlab
top-1%
github
top-5%
git
top-5%
Github Skills (23)
date-formatting10
javascript10
jquery10
mqtt10
internet-of-things10
date-format10
c1110
mqttnet10
c1710
gitlab10
getaddrinfo10
testing9
git9
github9
gnu9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
phstc/jquery-dateFormat
Dec 2015 - Dec 2015
jQuery Plugin to format Date outputs using JavaScript
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 1 PR, 1 comment in 1 day
Contributions summary:Chris focused on enhancing the `prettyDate` function within the jQuery DateFormat plugin. They implemented support for future dates, enabling the function to display time differences like "in a moment" and "x minutes/hours/days/weeks from now." They also added testing coverage to validate the new functionality and corrected minor formatting errors. Their work primarily involved modifying JavaScript code and updating test cases.
calendarjqueryoutputsjavascriptjquery-ui
eclipse-paho/paho.mqtt.c
Aug 2016 - Aug 2016
An Eclipse Paho C client library for MQTT for Windows, Linux and MacOS. API documentation: https://eclipse-paho.github.io/paho.mqtt.c/
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 PR in 1 day
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on enhancing the connection timeout functionality within the MQTT client library. Their contributions involved integrating `getaddrinfo()` to improve timeout handling, specifically for GNU-based systems. They also addressed platform-specific dependencies, preventing the use of `getaddrinfo_a()` on OSX and refining reliance on system types. The user's work resulted in improvements related to connection handling and overall platform compatibility.
apilinux-windowspahowindowseclipseiot
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