Auros Ansbergs Harman (known as Robert Michael Harman before a legal name change in 2017) is the senior Support Engineer for Tesla industrial batteries. He resides in San Bruno, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he serves as Chair of the Planning Commission. He holds an MBA from the Presidio Graduate School, and Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University.
Auros has a history as an activist for the Democratic Party. In January 2007 he was elected to serve as one of 12 delegates from Assembly District 21 representing over 100,000 registered Democrats on the California Democratic Party State Central Committee; he served two terms. He served for three years on the board of the Peninsula Democratic Coalition, the largest and most venerable club in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties; in this role, he sought to coordinate activities of PDC with the affiliated Peninsula Young Democrats. He chaired the Santa Clara County Grassroots Steering Committee for Phil Angelides' 2006 California gubernatorial campaign, volunteered with Jerry McNerney's first successful campaign for the House, and with the 2010 and 2020 campaigns of Josh Becker. He is interested in technical issues related to politics, such as gerrymandering, voting machines, and alternate election systems (such as Approval Voting and Single Transferrable Vote for Proportional Representation). Other major areas of interest include universal healthcare; tax structure and economic inequality; and global warming, alternative energy, and energy independence.
Auros worked for six years at Motorola, as Language Lead of the Predictive Input Team. Most of his time at Motorola was spent developing new language packs for Motorola's iTAP engine. He also consulted on language-related issues across a wide range of phone functionality -- sorting phonebook entries, proper display of non-Roman-script digits, bidirectionality, etc. Through his work, Auros was exposed to many aspects of the Unicode Standard. He once wrote a humorous poem on the subject.
He is also mildly "internet famous" for having developed a correspondence with a variety of authors at Slate magazine, originally by way of sending in corrections (even before Slate established a formal way to receive corrections). His informal role with Slate was mentioned in the book Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech, by Craig Silverman.
| JHU | This user attends or attended Johns Hopkins University |
 | This user attends or attended the University of California, Berkeley. |