As President and CEO of Mantis Development Corporation, a Boston-based software development firm specializing in advanced media and network technologies, Aaron directed the company he co-founded in 1992 from inception until late 1997. In 1997 he became Chairman of the firm. In 2003 he founded Mantis Development Corps — a global network of several hundred elite technology inventors, researchers, software developers, and content authors — through which he directs the Web3D Web and Media Grid.
An international best-selling technology author, Aaron is active in the International Standards community as founding Chair of the Web3D Consortium (Web3DC) Universal Media Working Group, founding Chair of the Web3D-MPEG Working Group responsible for the convergence of Web3D and Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) technology, Co-Chair of the Web3D Consortium's Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Task Group, and Web3D Liaison to MPEG and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He teaches at Boston College, conducts related workshops and lectures at industry conferences, holds United States patents for modern graphical user interfaces for local and Internet information reference and retrieval, and has patents pending for network caching techniques and processes.
Aaron teaches Computer Graphics and Internet and Web application development at Boston College, where he was manager of the Advanced Technology Group (ATG) before departing to found Mantis Development Corporation. As manager of ATG, Aaron was lead software architect and senior software engineer for a number of advanced technology projects developed at Boston College, including robust client/server information systems that pre-date the World Wide Web. During that time Aaron also wrote core software for Eagle Eyes, a Boston College research project that enables users to navigate their personal computer through eye movement alone which has subsequently been commercialized as CameraMouse. Eagle Eyes was selected as a finalist in Discover Magazine's 1994 Awards for Technical Innovation. Aaron's work on Eagle Eyes was the outgrowth of Virtual Reality (VR) research that he conducted in the early 1990s. In 1997 he donated portions of his VR research to the open standards community by founding the Universal Media group through which he contributed his media cache concepts and technology to the Web3D Consortium and the international 3D community at large.
A frequent advisor to high technology companies, Aaron has designed standalone and networked hardware and software products using a combination of technologies including C/C++, Java, J2EE, XML, HTML, JavaScript, style sheets, streaming media, Web3D, and relational/object databases. He routinely participates in the development of business, marketing and technology plans for his clients and has conducted related workshops and lectures at industry conferences and expositions such as the Internet Commerce Expo (ICE), ACM/SIGGRAPH, and the Web3D/Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) Symposia. His award-winning Web3D Roundup performance astounded Web3D Symposia 2000 as detailed by SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics and About's 3D Graphics/Virtual Reality reporter.
An international best-selling technology author, Aaron has written numerous articles for journals and magazines such as Dr. Dobb's Programming Journal, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, New Architect (formerly Web Techniques), and MacTech Magazine (formerly MacTutor). He has written a number of books for Wiley (formerly IDG Books Worldwide and Hungry Minds) including Destination Multimedia, Java For Dummies, Foundations of Java Programming for the World Wide Web, Java Bible, Java 2 Bible, Visual InterDev for Dummies and J2EE 1.4 Essentials. In addition, Aaron was the first Java columnist for IDG Books Online, and was the founding author and series editor for Prentice Hall's series of Web3D books that includes Core Web3D, Java 3D API Jump-Start, MPEG-4 Jump-Start. He was also lead author and editor for a series of Internet and Web standards books published by Prentice Hall, including XHTML Example by Example, ebXML: The Technical Specifications, ebXML: The Technical Reports, UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL: The Web Services Specification Reference Book, and related titles.