Official: Asim Baig is the president of Cognizo Technologies, Inc., which he founded in 2004 after spending 14 years in the IT industry. Asim is a technical professional and entrepreneur. Before founding Cognizo, Asim started Seleriti Corporation in 1999 where he oversaw the development of a Java based Enterprise electronic billing and payment system. As Director of Development at Digital River Inc. (DRIV), he was instrumental in building and enhancing the B2B commerce division. Also prior to starting Cognizo he was CIO at Quorum, a leading legal technologies provider where he streamlined the IT organization and established offshore development centers. Asim has played a significant role in large scale UNIX implementations, developed enterprise systems and directed efforts for emerging web technologies. As a consultant he provided services to Honeywell, 3M, Medtronic, MCI, and the University of Minnesota. A 1995 graduate of the University of Minnesota, he holds a BS in Electrical Engineering.

Real: Likes to start new businesses. Secretly wishes to make a living doing photography and playing saxophone. Thinks you have arrived in photography, when one of your own photograph's is worthy of enlargement and hanging on the wall. After 10,000+ shutter clicks, he's still on the quest to find the perfect one.

Workhorse: Macbook Pro w/ Mac OS X Leopard

Official: Alex brings a career of sales and business development to Cognizo. He has come to Cognizo after being part of the MRI Network, the world's largest recruiting agency. Alex concentrates on introducing Cognizo to new clients while maintaining and servicing the company's substantial client base.

Alex has the ability to quickly build rapport with new clients and probe to determine each individual client's specific needs. He also works closely with Cognizo's recruiters to locate the top talent in the IT industry and relay the exciting opportunities with Cognizo's client companies.

Real: An instructor in the martial arts for over 30 years, Alex has written a book titled "The Science of Stand Up Fighting," where he teaches a new approach to martial arts, using human physiology in a self defense or sport aspect. If he's not teaching marital arts, he can be found spending quality time with his family.

Official: Andrew joined the Cognizo team in the summer of 2007. He grew up with several Tandy/Radio Shack and early Apple computers, writing programs in BASIC. As new technologies emerged, he learned all sorts of languages, his favorites being C/C++ (w/STL), PHP, Bash, Ruby and loves working with GNU/Linux and the command line.

He loves math and algorithms and competed on a first place math team in the St. Paul Public Schools. He enjoys working with parsing and machine learning — especially in finding simple and lightweight solutions to very complex tasks. Before Cognizo, he designed software for a construction company, a car rental shop, a hardware store and a blues musician.

Real: Plans to build the world's first mechanical centaur by age 50, raise it to be merciless (but fair) and conquer the world with it. Then the day will come where he will realize a flaw in his design, it will cross him, and he will be forced to build an army of mechanical mentaurs to defeat it. This day shall be made into a national holiday called Centaurday, or by its lengthier version: Centaurday, here's to there never being a mentaurday-day.

Workhorse: Core 2 Duo Desktop - Ubuntu Linux w/Compiz-Fusion

Official: Andy has been working with Cognizo since the summer of 2008. He mainly studied C/C++ in school, but has now branched out into PHP, perl, some Python, and more. He has a strong thirst for knowledge, so his skills are constantly growing.

He was first introduced to Linux at Minnesota State University: Moorhead, while earning his degree in Computer Science. After using it in the classroom, he decided to install it on his personal computer. Now, all of his computers are running Linux. He eventually plans to work on a free and open source project so that he can give back to the Linux community and help it grow.

Real: Enjoys spending time with his family and fiancé, eating out, going to the movies, and playing with his kitten. In his spare time he types on his keyboard, reads books (programming books and sci-fi novels) and listens to Linux podcasts.

Workhorse: Intel Workstation - Ubuntu Linux w/ Compiz Fuzion

Official: Naeem joined Cognizo in Nov 2006 as a recruiter. Naeem played a significant role in developing a large candidate database at Cognizo. He is considered the resident expert on writing complex search queries to find "gems" in Cognizo's internal and paid databases.

Naeem gradudate in 2004 with a BS in Computer Science and is currently enrolled in evening MBA and wants to pursue a career in Human Resource Management.

Real: A man of few words, nevertheless, he is a Political junkie and history buff. Wants to be a columnist for a newspaper one day because he thinks he's an incredibly gifted writer. Has never written anything beyond a typical academic paper, though.

Official: With a strong interest in new media technologies, she freely exposed herself in radio, television and the Web, and earned an undergraduate degree in Journalism, Visual Communications and Spanish from the University of St. Thomas in 2006.

While learning about the Web, she picked up the front-end web design assets such as Photoshop effects, Illustrator vectors, XHTML, CSS and (light) Javascript. Now with Cognizo, Sae has entered into the world of Developer Darkness.

Sae has the sole responsibility of designing the user interface of Cognizo's software applications. She also handles customer support.

Real: Enjoys learning new life/design tactics, striking conversations with strangers, picking up on '80s and country music, catching up with early-years school friends, and cooking meals with her family and boyfriend.

Workhorse: Intel Workstation - Windows XP Pro w/ Adobe Creative Suite 3, Macbook Pro w/ Mac OS X Leopard

Official: Uzair has been with Cognizo Recruiting since November '06. With little prior recruiting experience, Uzair has gained a lot of experiences at Cognizo. Over the past year, he has added 1500+ resumes of PHP developers to Cognizo's database and contributed in making PHP/LAMP recruitment a niche of Cognizo.

Uzair is the resident "networking and wiring" guy at the ofice. He has successfully administrated the Cognizo off-shore network, which grew from 4 to 21 computers in the last year. Uzair graduated in 2004 with a BA in Journalism and Economics. Currently Uzair is working towards his MBA with specialization in Human Resource Management.

Real: Avid Volleyball player. Really into "spiritual poetry." Uzair possesses the ability to hyperfocus on a subject matter. Known to get so engrossed in a single-tasking mode, that he sometimes has to sit down while chewing a gum. With his latent computer talents, Uzair believes that he will always have a fallback profession in "wiring" if his career in HR doesn't pan out.

Austin Smith

Official: Austin is an experienced LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) programmer with expertise in dynamic graphics using the GD library as well as remote XML services and custom template solutions.

His computer science interests include lexical parsing, graphics analysis, and machine learning. He’s taking time off from working on a B.A. in Computer Science and History at the University of Minnesota and plans to eventually attend some sort of grad school so that he can work for himself, or failing that, teach.

He plays the piano at parties, weddings, and churches on the side.

Real: Inept hacker who likes to eat, drink, and smoke.

Brian Hanson

Offical: Brian started working with Cognizo in the summer of 2006. Prior to joining Cognizo, Brian has had an interest in Car PCs and Open Source Software, and has helped develop multiple applications for the open sourced community including a GPS software interface for touchscreen computers, and a tool to download files off of the IRC network. Brian spends most of his freetime working on his car and innovating (or breaking) personal electronics.

Brian's primary responsibilities have been in the area of dynamic UI design, sub-system design, plugin framework and bug/issue tracking.

Real: Wants to travel the world off of money made from a successful consulting venture. Wastes his time playing Warcraft III in the mean time.

Will Buckner

Official: Will was the Core Team Lead since the Summer of 2005. Will is an expert PHP developer, Linux/FreeBSD guru, and the resident open-source expert. Will is working on his Zend certification these days. Will started tinkering with computers since he was 8.

By age 13, he was actively coding in C, and participating in open source projects. He is also the Lead Developer for Eggdrop, the most popular IRC bot. Will likes to travel, and is also interested in live sound and music recording/mastering.

Will is involved in overall architectural design, coding standards, version control, documentation, system robustness/failover/resiliency planning and payment processing.

Real: Wants to be a sound engineer touring the country with a rock band (his own maybe).