UCL Institute for Security & Resilience Studies

Weaving together threads from a variety of fields, Vinay has made substantial contributions to disaster relief, contingency management and environmentalism. While at the Rocky Mountain Institute, he worked on Small is Profitable (The Economist's Book of the Year, 2003) on renewable energy economics; and Winning the Oil Endgame, a Pentagon-funded study on US energy independence.

His core approach is to design public domain technological solutions which render hard problems soluble. Most notable is the hexayurt, a disaster relief shelter designed to be made using standard building industry components and skills; and CheapID, a genocide-resistant biometrics architecture designed for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Vinay was instrumental in the creation of STAR-TIDES, a US National Defense University disaster management program, focused on open source and open collaboration. He co-authored Defense Horizons #70, "STAR-TIDES and Starfish Networks". His infrastructure modeling language, Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps, is in use at NDU and elsewhere.