Hi Everyone: Thanks for your work and this opportunity to present myself. Yes, I am now a long time lurker and this is my story.
I am very international: US Citizen, born in Spain and living and working for most of my professional life in Germany in the automotive industry. I am an IT Manager, I majored at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) in Management Information System (IT degree in the School of Business) but also had a minor in Computer Science Engineering. Later on, I got an International MBA, which I completed in Germany as an exchange student. I have a German wife and 2 Children and have been working in Germany for the past 22 years. I am an IT Manager responsible for several global projects at a very large automotive manufacturer. The neural network approach to artificial intelligence has been my fascination and hobby for many years since the 1980¹s and when I cam across Jeff¹s book ³On Intelligence² and his white papers and some of his interviews and speeches in the web, I was sure he is on to something very big. I have developed a good intuition for the characteristics of our brain and central nervous system as models for IT simulations and the CLA, HTM, SDR concepts together are very brilliant and worth their weight in gold. As it turns, I also apply some data science to some of the data in our systems and I believe that GROK may one day be a good solution for some future applications. For now, this is a hobby I follow with enthusiasm. For the last year, aside from lurking and learning a lot from the discussion threads, I have been teaching myself C++ and especially the advance use of pointers. I know some Python 2.7, but need to refreshen my skills and I also bought a book on GIT. All of this in the hope that I will soon be able to contribute something without being more of a burden than any help. But keep in mind, I do all this after work hours, so my progress is slow. But I am also ambitious and want to understand the core and the scripting and all this, down to the nuts and bolts. I will soon start looking at your code. Thus far I have been working on my skills only. Thank you all and especially Matt for your great contributions and dedication. Cheers from Germany, Joe On 29.08.14 16:54, "Matthew Taylor" <m...@numenta.org> wrote: >Hello NuPIC, > >Thanks for your patience during this very annoying mailing list >situation. It seems that the dust has settled after migrating to our >own virtual private server, and the lists are back to 100% >functionality. > >... But that's not good enough for me! I think we should STRESS-TEST >our mailing lists' new home. So here is the plan: I've sent this >message to each of our four mailing lists. Please reply to this >message with a short SELF-INTRODUCTION! I'm especially interested in >hearing from LURKERs who've been reading the lists but never posted. >Let us know you exist, even if it's just a short "hello world!". If >you are an established poster that everyone knows, perhaps you should >share something interesting or unique about yourself that no one on >the list knows. > >Here's mine: > >I spent over four years in the US Air Force working as an intelligence >analyst. I worked to support the B-2 Stealth program, and I trained >pilots about air defense systems, so I know a lot about surface-to-air >missiles. After leaving the Air Force, I worked as a defense >contractor, where I really got into programming mostly in fortran77 >and shell scripts. I had to convince my coworkers to use Java!! Can >you believe that? Anyway, I realized I wanted to dedicate my career to >software development instead of supporting combat operations, so I >left to build code, and I ended up here at Numenta. > >Your turn! > >--------- >Matt Taylor >OS Community Flag-Bearer >Numenta >
