The Dean

A note from Dean Sina.

I did not plan to become a college dean. I planned to run a venture studio — which I do, at STEALTH, an award-winning artificial intelligence incubator operating in official partnership with NVIDIA Corporation. Founded in 2018, STEALTH commercializes applied AI research across consumer, infrastructure, and vertical software markets. We’ve built and backed more than six hundred ventures — Compass, Whim, GAMBIT, VCTR, INSOLAR, Round Z, and a long list of others. That’s the day job, and I was named Entrepreneur of the Year for building it.

The academic side is just as real. I’m a Professor of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at California State University, Fullerton, where my research and applied practice in artificial intelligence long predates the field’s recent mainstream emergence. By 2017 I was already experimenting with machine learning and robot vision architectures at the UCI Applied Innovation Lab. In May 2018 — four years before ChatGPT — I was invited to speak at the International Conference on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Los Angeles, presenting peer-reviewed work on applied ML and robot vision. I’ve been a keynote speaker at big data, robotics, and AI conferences worldwide since the field was still a niche. That matters. STEALTH’s NVIDIA partnership gives us grade-A computational infrastructure; my academic standing gives us technical depth and research credibility that is almost unheard of in early-stage venture investment and incubation. That combination is the engine behind Forkaia.

The teaching job happened by accident. Cal State Fullerton asked me to run an Applied Psychology Internship class. I said yes expecting to lecture a few times a course. What I actually did was spend the course watching bright, hungry undergrads turn in work that was indistinguishable from the first-month output of my paid Stealth operators - because the actual skill of working is a skill, and nobody was teaching it.

So we built Forkaia. Not to burn down CSUF or anybody else. To be the parallel track - the one that runs alongside the degree instead of after it. The one where you declare an Applied major, practice it under people who do it for a living, and walk away with a transcript that an employer can verify in one click.

That is the entire plan. Twenty majors. Four tuition tiers. Real cohorts. Real advisors. Real rituals. A real diploma. Everything a four-year degree was supposed to be before it got decorative.