At age 18, in 1944, he joined the US infantry until war’s end. A Japanese language interpreter, he performed a wide range of military police duties in the army of occupation in Tokyo, 1946. Supported by the GI bill, he obtained a bachelor’s degree at MIT and was a PhD in mathematics at Harvard in 1952. Kay co-founded TRG, Inc. a military R&D company (1954 '63). His work led to improved performance in microwave transmission and reception both in short distances and over the earth’s horizon and in radio astronomy, exploring from the ionosphere, out to the furthest reaches of the universe. In 1966, Kay founded AutEx, (Automatic Exchange), a supplier of electronic "marketplace" systems, similar in function but preceding the Internet by about 20 years. AutEx offered various industries, mostly the securities industry, an on-line network system for transactions between the industry and its suppliers and customers. AutEx was the first operating B2B e-commerce company that also provided the first commercially available email. In 1978, after selling AutEx (now owned by Thomson Financial), Kay became a donor and board member of public policy organizations and an investor and advisor to start-up companies pioneering energy efficiency and anti-pollution technologies. From 1987 to 2007 his non-profit ATI, along with others, established the art and science of public-interest polling. He is author of "Locating Consensus for Democracy – a Ten Year US Experiment", 1998; "Spot the Spin: the Fun Way to Keep Democracy Alive and Elections Honest", Trafford, 2007; and “Militarist, Millionaire, Peacenik – Memoir of a Serial Entrepreneur” Cosimo, 2008 NYC. He is a board member of the World Security Institute, in June 2008 the fastest growing, non-partisan think-tank in Washington, DC, with offices in LA, Cairo, Brussels, Moscow, and Beijing, publishers of E-Publications in Chinese, Russian, Arabic and Farsi languages avidly read by media in many countries, and the sponsor of producer Daljit Dhaliwal's "Foreign Exchange" TV show. WSI is also the host of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Kay, with his partner, global futurist Hazel Henderson, resides in Florida.
