Technologist, Sociologist, Optimist
Developer, artist, programmer, serial founder, machine learning engineer.
I "build models and know things". I love helping people smarter than me realise their vision.
University of Otago, NZ
First Class Honours Mathematics
(Summa cum laude)
Machine Learning Engineer / Dev Ops
Working with iwi group Te Reo Irirangi o Te Hiku o Te Ika from 2019 I led the initial machine learning effort to train models and build an API for the world's first speech recognition system in Māori. We have done so much more since then!
The contributions of our small lab were recognised when our founder was recognized as one of the Time100 "most influential people in AI".
Co-founder
Together is a project that asks the question - what if we could actually see the network of connections showing who has been acknowledged by who in a community?
Thousands of mutual aid groups sprang into existence in March and April 2020. "Mutual Aid World" built software to support such groups. After co-founding with three others I helped organize hundreds of volunteer developers, designers and contributors of all stripes. As well as active tech support we built cryptographically strong contact tracing, a phone support line, and the "resilience app" - which was a react mobile app for organizing delivery of food boxes. In partnership with local groups we helped deliver thousands of food boxes.
Co-founder / Source
Cashless is about making money human again - merging crypto primitives with a new way to think about mutual credit. We provide an alternative way to keep track of credit through communities and tools for greater reliability and transparency - allowing communities to scale trust and act as their own bank.
Research and development into resilient coordination protocols in distributed, unreliable environments. Simulation of information flows in distributed messaging environments. Bayesian modeling of multi-agent systems in the face of variance in the reliability of actors. Most of this work remains proprietary but the 'realtime fact benchmark' is one of it's public outputs.
Working with the VR pioneers at RealityVirtual I designed, trained and deployed a new machine learning pipeline and API for creating virtual reality assets (displacement maps, normals and the like) from regular SLR photographs.
Working with local community groups I helped coordinate and was the developer for a website to represent the community where I live - Paekākāriki, NZ. This features a services directory, calendar, radio station, forums and information for tourists as well as photo essays, poetry and other content.
A love letter to the town in which I live, produced in collaboration with my community Visit paekakariki.nz
I created the text for Annie Dorsen's 2017 theater piece The Great Outdoors (in collaboration with Marcel Schwittlick).
This work involved building a system to harvest text from recent comments on the internet, measure the textual entropy of that text, and select it out in various ways to fit the aesthetics of the piece. Developing the algorithm collaboratively with Annie Dorsen was a truly fascinating and wonderful experience. Working at this level in theater was another awesome treat for me. I wrote the project up as a talk for a machine learning meetup, the slides of which are below.
View slides from the talk
Over some years I have collaborated with Jeff Donaldson, one of the early protagonists of the Glitch-Art movement and creator of the Glitchaus fashion brand on his data-knits project. Amongst other things, I created a tool that he can use to take any binary and prepare it for physical projection into woven or knit textile form. Jeff used the program to prepare work for his Bauhaus collection as well as other pieces.
Check out GlitchHaus
A silly little experiment from March 2023, using GPT to create poetry. Back when we were more excited about such things. GPT choose the content, wrote the poem. I did curate a careful prompt to bound the piece.
View the full piece here
