After being diagnosed with a brain cancer (meningioma) and p1RCC (a rare kidney cancer) in 2014, Bill co-founded rarekidneycancer.org with Dr. James Hsieh in 2016.  In 2018 and 2020, with Pete Kane, he brought together 17 teams of more than 80 researchers who used his medical data to determine “genes of interest” related to his disease.  He applied ensemble reasoning to evaluate the results of these kaggle-like hackathons (which Bill calls “gamified tumor boards” ) to discover better ways to do cancer research.  Bill has automated these “gamified tumor boards” using Large Language Models (LLMs) and is investigating how many "second opinions" are necessary in order to make good decisions for rare cancer care.

Bill first got involved in medical research at age 17 by filtering and preparing polyacrylamide for gels in Baylor College of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology for Dr. Ro-Choi, who sequenced 4.5 S RNA1 in Novikoff hepatoma ascites cells.

Bill’s 50 year career in AI and ML started at age 18, when he worked with Howie Johnson at Rice University using n-grams (like chatGPT) to do classical music composition.  He continued his music work at MIT in Steve Ward’s lab exploring generative grammars and constraints.  He then applied his Symbolic AI knowledge to Electrical Design Automation as the 16th employee at Daisy Systems where he met Vinod Khosla. Bill left after Daisy’s IPO to found Atherton Technology (which failed) and then Calico Commerce (which IPOed), where he repurposed his music composition system to do sales configuration over the internet (Patent 5,745,765).  Vinod funded both efforts. After Bill took Calico public, he retired and worked with Sabrina Paseman to use non-invasive Blood fluorescence to detect iron deficiency anemia (Patent 8,306,594) and with Katherine Paseman to expand Pulse oximetry technology to do non-invasive measurement of Hemoglobin and Hematocrit  (See Katherine’s Intel Science Talent Search Semi-Finalist paper "c <> 35H: A New Model Relating Hemoglobin, Hematocrit, and Optical Density").

Since his diagnosis, Bill has dedicated his time to rarekidneycancer.org, several other patient advocacy organizations and as a CDMRP reviewer.