I’m Chris, a 30 year vet of enterprise software with a longer history as a brain-fan kicked off by Carl Sagan’s “Dragons of Eden” in the 80s. I’m a federated, distributed processing/transactions, big data, high performance SQL/Java/Python guy that started long ago with HPUX, DGUX, and 10 years of NeXTSTEP.

I spent a few years on topology and fiber bundles - which has come in handy in recent times for topological data analysis / data science.

I’ve gone through spurts of obsession with language, cetacean (woot Orcas!) intelligence, ravens, and more recently octopus. “The Other Brain” pulled me into glial cells. Word2Vec pulled me into embeddings, auto encoders, eigen decompositions, the rotation problem and tensors - blew my mind that abstraction == compression. DeepMind’s “Hybrid computing using a neural network with dynamic external memory” pulled me into the perforant path, index theory of memory, and stochastic associative content addressable memory. Currently fascinated by Santoro et al’s “relation networks” - how does reasoning work? (Also looking forward to attending DARPA’s AI conference with heavy reasoning focus in March if you’re going - say hi!)

Then found HTM-School on Youtube talking about sparse distributed representations, which pulled me into Pentti Kanerva’s book and to HTMs and Numenta.

All of this is a blast! It’s some of the most exciting stuff I’ve ever encountered and the weird introspective a-ha! moments are too much fun.