Since there seems to be some genuine interest in Matt's proposal, here
is my CV ;-)
My professional background is in Electrical Engineering where I have a
doctorate degree. As far as software development/programming is
concerned, I am self-educated. Despite that fact I am currently teaching
programming at a vocational school where topics range from
microcontroller applications to web applications. I have worked to
various degrees with C, C++, C#, HTML, PHP/MySQL, JavaScript, Python,
Scheme, Delphi and Fortran77. For several reasons my favorite language
today is JavaScript. For an example have a look at
https://web.chessclub.com which is a web interface to the Internet Chess
Club servers written in JavaScript/jQuery (client) and node.js (server).
I am very much interested in artificial intelligence and have dabbled
with neural nets and genetic algorithms for a while. Thus, I was pleased
with the neural net renaissance triggered by the deep learníng success
stories. Still, in my opinion some crucial ingredients necessary for the
emergence of artificial intelligence are missing there. Then I stumbled
over "On Intelligence" and was intrigued by Jeff's approach to actually
learn from the only truly intelligent system available, i.e. the brain.
Also, the six principles of neocortical function that are being modelled
by HTM/CLA just make sense to me. I think the ingredients missing in
deep learning can be found among those principles. So I looked into
NuPIC and decided to get involved.
In order to do something useful, I have started to work on one of the
newbie issues in numenta.nupic. To understand the algorithms better and
to be able to run HTM/CLA in a browser, I'm currently porting htm.java
to JavaScript. Progress is good despite the fact that I have never coded
anything in Java.
Regards, RS
Am 11.04.2015 um 20:08 schrieb Matthew Taylor:
I'm seeing many new faces in our community, and I keep wondering about
the skill sets you folks have. Does anyone want to describe their
technical programming prowess? Here is your chance to brag about your
history. I'll go first ;)...
I started seriously programming around 2002 in PHP and FORTRAN77,
believe it or not. I had taken no college classes at all at the time,
but I was an analyst at a company that was doing lots of complex
military defense simulations in FORTRAN. I was doing PHP as a hobby
and learning relational databases in MySQL (when it was free as in
beer).
I finally went to school and learned Java while I was working on Java
wrappers to our FORTRAN applications so scientists, engineers, and
pilots could actually use the simulations without intense technical
help. This involved a lot of Swing GUI work, so I started getting more
into front-end technology at that time.
I quit my job and moved to St. Louis to work as a freelance software
contractor, landing almost entirely Java jobs for several years, but
getting a breadth of experience in some diverse fields, but always
supporting scientific research in some way. Jobs working for banks are
boring. ;)
Then I got into Groovy, a functional and dynamically typed JVM
language with very tight integration with Java. This really piqued my
interested in functional programming, and I got involved in the Lambda
Lounge group that was just starting up [1]. We were mostly disgruntled
Java programmers who wanted to work in more interesting language
paradigms, and I believe we changed the programming landscape in St.
Louis to be much more polyglot.
Somehow I networked with the right people and got a job for G2One, a
startup that included the founders of the Groovy language and the
Grails web framework. At this time, I was working a bit on Grails
itself, and implementing a GUI plugin that integrated Javascript as a
collection of server-side pages, so backend programmers didn't have to
mess around with the JS (this was before Javascript was considered a
"serious" programming language to most people).
Then SpringSource bought G2One (I was a contractor, so I didn't get a
payoff), and I was laid off after 6 months. Eventually VMWare bought
SpringSource, Pivotal took over all the Groovy Grails stuff, and then
dropped it all and it moved to the Apache Foundation. Anyway I still
have a good relationship with all the Groovy/Grails folks, and I still
have a deep-seeded love for the elegant Groovy language.
During my time working on GrailsUI (the Grails Javascript plugin), I
worked extensively with YUI, the Yahoo! User Interface Javascript
library. So I emailed the YUI time a bit and got to know them, which
was great because David Glass helped me get a job at Yahoo! and I
moved my entire family from St. Louis to Cupertino.
I worked at Yahoo! for 2 years maintaining and building Javascript
frameworks. I learned a lot about Javascript, and that helped me get a
job as a Frontend Engineer at Numenta. When Numenta approached me, I
was really surprised, because I'd been a follower for a long time
(since reading On Intelligence), and I had always dreamed of working
on something I thought was so important.
So I went from F2E at Numenta to Manager of Web Services, helping
build out REST APIs and such. Then when Numenta got the open source
bug, I jumped at the chance to help make open source NuPIC a reality.
And here I am. :)
[1] http://lambdalounge.org/
Who's next?
---------
Matt Taylor
OS Community Flag-Bearer
Numenta
