Andrew Burton, Ph.D.
AI research scientist & creative software engineer with broad experience in natural & artificial "intelligence": human & computer vision (deep & traditional), NLP, machine learning algorithm design, stochastic optimization, cognitive & computational neuroscience, and interaction & perceptual design.
I live for prototyping the creative and improbable, and I want to render our subtle social, aesthetic, and design intuitions computable. We live our lives making subjective judgments about places we visit, products we use, and things people say -- let's quantify them.
My specific research interests are computational sociolinguistics & computational aesthetics, metastatistics of image synthesis and category formation in convolutional neural networks, and bootstrapping vision & environmental understanding modules in virtual worlds (sometimes to evaluate virtual worlds, and sometimes just to build more robust vision modules).
I hold a Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences (Cognitive Neuroscience), an M.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience, a B.S. with Honors in Cognitive Sciences (Experimental Psychology: Sensation, Perception, Attention & Memory), and a minor in Information & Computer Science from the Bren School of ICS from the University of California, Irvine, where I was a member of the Psychology Honors Program and Campuswide Honors Program as well as the nonveridical & evolutionary perception lab and more peripherally the Neuromorphic Machine Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Cognitive Sciences. Most of my five years of university teaching involved leading instruction in research methods, statistical computing, and experimental psychology.
My work was at the intersection of evolutionary graph theory and genetic algorithms (evolutionary graph genetic algorithms, viral/memetic spread modeling, and genetic filter & image synthesis for specialist applications) but moved to contribute to perceptual organization, to encompass producing a fundamental theory and algorithms (active models of stigmergic segmentation, summary codes of probability mass functions, parallel distributed relational data structures, conjoined analysis of firing patterns of ensembles of Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks with gradient penalty and embeddings of embeddings) for assessing complexity as multimodal processing friction at the heart of computational vision: divorcing "things" from "stuff".
I've worked in high-level creative and technical roles in research & development in housewares, medical informatics, and notably the apparel industry, where I consulted on optical illusions, functional and attentional on-garment features, psychophysical experiments, cross-cultural consumer behavior, executive art exhibits, storefronts, ads & live experiences (AR/VR/anamorphics), manufacturing processes, internet trend surveillance, brand intelligence, multisensory marketing, 3D & precision prototyping, laser transfer functions & volumetric anthropometry, image synthesis & anomaly detection, inventory optimization, real estate placement and geospatial BI, design automation, floorplan & retail mix analysis, mathematical preference modeling, computational geometry, interactive genetic algorithms for product design, online experiments, and even produced a few jeans and dress designs that went into mass production.
On the more odd front, I have a patent I was awarded in high school for the first entry in a unique mechanical branch of trifunctional bottle openers, and even had them manufactured once upon a time. Also, I've contributed cartography to a few WWII history books concerning the Pacific theater.
I've loved programming since I was 9 (C and some Logo!) and enjoy reverse engineering and modding a variety of games under a variety of aliases to add new and improbable functions to them. Think writing inverse kinematics, solitaire, tetris, poker, and an interpreter you can use in-game in a certain FPS-RPG whose scripting language doesn't support arbitrary length arrays, indexed string access, or direct object instantiation) and to write various utilities plumbing old file formats (for games like Freelancer, Knights of the Old Republic & The Witcher, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Fallout 1 & 2, The Elder Scrolls, Yoda Stories, etc.). Eventually, you'll see some of these things rematerialize on this site.
I like comparative programming languages as a topic and despite negative transfer still know bits of things spanning C, Python, SQL (T-SQL, DB2, Apache Spark dialects, etc.), MATLAB, C++, JavaScript, PHP(4), C#, Java, VB6, Lisp (mostly R5RS or Racket), R, 6502 Assembly, Fortran 77, Elixir, Scala, Rust, and I'm sure other obvious non-DSL (e.g. Inform 7), non archaeological (e.g. ALGOL 60), non-esolang (somewhere I have Chef & Piet interpreters) languages. Mostly Python is accessible to the old memory banks over my MATLAB, C, Java and C# specialties of the past due to the more open data science climate and my love of Python's weird facilities for metaprogramming, monkeypatching, and extremely deep reflection but there are really awesome language features buried in less normatively productive languages (Elixir's bitfield-esque bitstring destructuring, Haskell's and Scala 3 + Cats type system & pattern matching, Rust's FFI, C#'s call-by keywords, JavaScript's strange .prototype vs __proto__ distinction, and anything to do with Lispy macros). I used to do everything from Win32 to .NET WinForms to IIS+MSSQL+PHP programming and liked sites like pinvoke.net and tolerated stuffing string tables and UI specification into DLLs, but I mostly live in Linux cloud and desktop terminal land and ssh around my living room and elsewhere these days.
I've done stints of graphic design and comedy writing (my non-science awards have mostly been in English or (art history) as hobbies in the past. You can probably talk to me about psychedelic & art rock, dystopian, cult classic, and revisionist Western movies, computer science textbooks, video games with experimental gameplay elements, depressing moralistic novels, sterile industrial or ultra-fake Italianate architecture, rambling lists delimited once in a while with commas, and culinary sauces. I like to be in tune with the history & the full range of computing -- people have been so creative and I'm always looking to add to that a bit.
- ajb
(a la dmr, and I was tempted to do a jwz-type site but this appealed to me more)
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