Al worked, during his first stint in the lab as a research affiliate, worked on inventing a variety of novel computational architectures for understanding neural data. Before, he served as Vice President and General Manager for Datacommunications, Telecommunications, and Industrial Electronics Design Services, at Cadence Design Systems, amongst many other roles in the technology industry. He helped initiate a number of projects in the lab, and continued to interact with students doing research after completing his research affiliateship.