About Me

I’ve always found it a bit difficult to write about myself, but here we go. I’m currently a Research Scientist at Noeon Research. By itself, that doesn’t really say much. If I drill down a bit further, I’m a specialist in knowledge representation generally, and the application of answer set programming towards that end in particular. Again, that may tell the you what it is that I currently do in my professional life, but that’s about it. I suspect that if you’re reading my essays, then you are more likely interested in the answer to the question of “why?”.

The reason why I chose to become a computer scientist is fairly straightforward - I chose the career path that would ultimately enable me to provide for a family the way I wanted to. My other option was the cello, but by the time I was ready to begin my university studies I came to terms with the fact that I did not have enough talent as a cellist to provide the kind of life I wanted to be able to when I had a family. Studying the cello the way that I did, and my relationship with that instrument, informed my ultimate evolution in (most likely innumerable) subtle ways. As to why I chose computer science? That was fairly simple as at the time, my father was a computer scientist and logician, and my mother was a skilled computer programmer.

As to why I chose to become a computer scientist as opposed to a computer programmer, there are three experiences in my life that are formative. The first was in high school during a physics lecture. I remember vividly feeling awestruck at the beauty and elegance of Newton’s Laws of Motion, and feeling that this was something that could not have been born out of an accident. This most certainly cemented in me a conviction that there are laws which govern our existence, and that they are beautiful in and of themselves. My second experience was of a similar nature, but instead of studying laws of a physical nature, we were studying laws of thought in the form of proofs. The particular moment occurred while we were proving the correctness of some recursive algorithms over binary search trees and I remember bursting out in exuberant laughter once everything somehow just “clicked”. So what happened was an experience of deep-seated joy at the application of these laws towards understanding a new concept. This feeling then carried over into my courses on artificial intelligence where I learned how we could use logic and introspection to discover deeper laws that govern our own reasoning, forming the third (and still ongoing) experience of my life.

So my interest is in uncovering the laws that govern correct human reason and attempting to discover which of them are computable. This led me in turn to my loves of logic programming and knowledge representation and reasoning.

Outside of my professional life, I also enjoy studying History, Philosophy, Religion, Literature, Languages, and the martial arts of Judo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.