An Anecdotal Anecdote

I'm not going to make any pretense to greatness or even originality.  That's probably a rather shitty first sentence of the first post under this entity.  However, it is an important qualifier.  Apocryphal tales are rife within the world of math and science.  Issac Newton, for example, was never hit on the head by a falling apple.  Did Albert Einstein really come up with the gedanken "train experiment" whilst working as a patent clerk?  Perhaps Francis Crick really was well into a few tabs of acid when he envisioned the dual helix structure of DNA.  The veracity of these stories is less important than the easily digestible, easily expressed (it passes the "three beers at a bar" test), tale that convey the rather absurdity of creation or, rather, ideation.

Before I get too far into the abstract nature of what I'm trying to convey, make no mistake: I'm nowhere near any of these greats in terms of neither cognitive capabilities nor achievement.  E.g. I am not comparing myself to any of the aforementioned chaps.

To even get to a point where these, perhaps, untrue stories mean anything, to get to that point of concept one must have a fair amount of experience in a given milieu.  Since I was a teenager, that world, has been Computer Science.

I've been employed, professionally, as a practitioner of these arts since I was twenty.  I've spent years in school, both as an under-grad and an aspiring grad student.  However, such appeals to authority, are meaningless.  Degrees are just pieces of paper.  The journey from there to here is really what matters.

However, these years of living and breathing in a world of various levels of the mundane (programming) to the sublime (discrete mathematics, computer science, and all that those things encompass) certainly preps ones mind for... ideas.

For the first time in that span, nearly half of my life, I'm afforded an opportunity to reflect and pursue my passions therein.  All of this is just a rather wordy way of saying "I'm going to do what the hell I want for a little while."  

Enter "thoughtb.us."

In academia, I was often frustrated by the disconnect between what drew my attention (in the days of my abandoned PhD it was computational linguistics), and practical application.  You can build experimental systems and write papers on research and too often it just ends up in a journal or decaying drives of a University's catalog.  Granted, some of that disconnect is just ego.  "I want to be famous!"  Ha.  Well, that isn't really the drive, but proving oneself is an overriding concern.

So what did I do?

Well, I quit a job working at a DoD lab, dropped out of my PhD, and did something less exciting, but which allowed me to, cliche as it sounds, grow up.  That was nine years ago.

Then my company got sold.  

Malaise.

The new owners were less interested in esoteric experiments that may or may not lead to an immediate ROI.  Understandable.  Explaining what we had been doing in R&D to a company comprised mainly of ahem technologists and sales people was a gulf that couldn't be crossed.

Here's your walking papers and your buyout.  Great success.

In the process of returning to my own academic interests, I became obsessed with neuroscience and psychology.  I dove into books and papers (more to come on this in subsequent posts) and began to think more about computing solutions as holistic systems.  Users don't utilize a product in a vacuum.  Any tool sits between or amidst a very personal workflow.  Sure, you might use Evernote and JIRA, but you might also use a well worn Moleskin or a collection of Post-It notes affixed to your monitor.  Over time, astute and self-aware users tune their workflow to their job and how their mind works.  This usually isn't an overt gesture, but rather an evolutionary process that is undergone almost subconsciously. 

As Raghu Ramakrishnan, CTO for Data at Microsoft, pointed out in a recent interview you can't be an incomplete agent when considering things like data analysis or, forgive me, deep learning.  A bad computer scientist can only leverage so much of their mathematical knowledge or domain expertise (say biology or physics) to explore practical applications of data analysis.

My own experience over the past few years involved countless one off prototypes, closed systems, research interviews, mock ups, and the like.  This is great, however the value of higher level solutions is often not apparent until someone can actually use them.

So I found a domain that fit nicely with this loose concept and bought it.  I have some time.  I have a burning desire to make things and to see them used.

So here it is.  Finally.  (Goddamnit, man, get to the fucking point!)

Thoughtb.us is my platform for testing more practical solutions to problems that I suspect are real, but things I can't easily monetize.  I have this idea for a system that doesn't really exist, that helps users remember, find, and organize all atomic data units in a way that isn't really done now.  It's based partly on my understanding of available tools that fall within my milieu as well as my amateur knowledge of psychology and neuroscience.  

So I'm building a platform and I'm building a small app to explore some of these ideas.

To bring it back around to where I started, if anything comes of this at all (and it probably won't), my apocryphal tale will involve some bike ride where I was pursuing my other passion (bicycle racing/riding), half listening to a Jesus Lizard record and digesting a litany of these thoughts... and that is not only what I'm exploring with this project, but also the genesis of all of it.

I'm endlessly fascinated with what we can do with computer science and what human beings can naturally do as systems (more on this, of course).  Can I build something that is useful in correlating the two?  Can I at least learn something substantial?

I'm optimistic that the answer is yes.

So, to indulge a bit more...

It's a little after noon on a warm, but windy early Spring day in Colorado.  I've just finished tinkering with Watson's Alchemy API and contemplating the ramifications of sentiment analysis on textual data.  I'm breathing heavily as I climb a small hill, half looking at the numbers on the display of my Garmin, observing mule deer mill about the side of the road as the wind whips around me and sweat beads down my face.  As I crest the climb and adjust for a short descent it occurs to me "Why not?"  And that's where it all began... on a dusty road in Colorado during a lunch ride.

Cheers.