User:Paul Max Payton

Paul M. Payton became a member of the Technology, Strategy, and Innovation organization of Visa’s Chief Technology Office in January 2011. He has the responsibility for managing, developing, and conducting research and development projects domestically and internationally in the areas of information visualization, data mining/exploitation, and advanced technologies. His charter is to apply advanced software engineering and computer science concepts to develop new, over-the-horizon products and technology for insertion into Visa products and services.

Prior to joining Visa, Payton spent 28 years at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center/Palo Alto Research Laboratory, where he was principal software engineer on the staff of the vice president of research and development. In this capacity, he served as senior technical advisor to the Modeling, Simulation, and Information Sciences directorate of the ATC, managed and conducted independent research and development activities, and performed technology development and transfer to multiple classified billion-dollar programs. Payton’s nearly three decades of wide-ranging experience in defense and intelligence informatics include flight and ground processing software for missions of national importance, and research in cartographic/geo-spatial repositories. He served as consulting software engineer and staff scientist for the IDEX-II image exploitation station (now on exhibit in the Smithsonian) and the Intelligent Library System (now a product of Adam Systems), opening up ILS for copyright-free use of a generic “universal camera model” package for image measurement.

Payton holds seven patents in the areas of theoretical photogrammetry and color image compression and has either authored or coauthored fifty papers in computer vision, image metrics, cartographic feature extraction, and artificial intelligence applied to image understanding, including seminal book chapters in projective geometry. He has given presentations at industry-leading corporations in Silicon Valley, is a guest lecturer at U.C. Berkeley Extension on the topics of information visualization/presentation, and has received national awards for his effort on classified and unclassified efforts, including commendation from NASA for his work on the Columbia Shuttle Accident Investigation Board. He is listed in Who’s Who in Science and Engineering (1998), Who’s Who in America (2007), and Who’s Who in the World (2008).

He received honors degrees in mathematics and computer science with departmental and all-university honors from San Francisco State University and has done post-graduate study at both Berkeley and Stanford in computer science. Payton is currently based in Visa Inc.'s global headquarters in San Francisco, working out of Visa’s technology hub in Foster City.