Richard is responsible for overseeing the company’s strategic direction and enabling its rapid growth as a global provider of advanced technology and consulting services. As the founder of Modulus, Richard was instrumental in growing the sales, support, and business development units of the company. Richard immersed himself in financial markets at a very young age when he began trading futures under a custodial account. After obtaining an education in computer science, he developed software for top-tier financial institutions in the 1990's. In 1996, he developed a commodity trading system that used A.I. to analyze crop reports and weather data. On the heels of success, he founded an A.I. software company in the late 1990s. Focusing on new types of neural network algorithms, the company was later acquired by a Fortune 500 corporation. In 2010, Gardner developed a system which used Cloud-based Natural Language Processing to read tens of thousands of social media messages each second, extracting the meaning and emotion, including love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear, behind each message. Since then, the system has been running uninterrupted, having become the largest global sentiment database in the world. Richard has authored three programming languages ---TradeGPU, TradeBASIC, and TradeScript--- and he is the designer of the Real-Time Market Data (RMD) Server, a high performance time-series database engine for quantitative analysis of market data. Other research includes his past position as principal architect of SharpeMind, which was an A.I. system powered by IBM Watson, designed to read millions of financial reports in order to provide insights to make better investment decisions. Richard is also the founder and co-founder of a number of other successful technology startups outside of finance and is an active member of the Entrepreneurs' Organization.