Intro

Currently, I live in San Francisco. I have retired from a long career as a software developer, but still exercise my love of technical work as a volunteer webmaster.

School

I started out with BS and MS degrees in Electrical/Electronics Engineering, specializing first in computer design, and then in artificial intelligence, particularly in the pattern recognition branch. As is typical, most of my school work had little to do with my ultimate career as it evolved.

First Career

After graduation, I worked in a cardiology research institute which was engaged in studying electrical activity of the heart, to investigate what triggers fibrillation and how to use body-surface measurements for diagnosis. The techniques I learned for my MS degree were used for data analysis and presentation. In one project, I analyzed the information content from electro-cardio skin surface measurements of the entire thorax to determine the optimal subset of measurements. The outcome was that according to the analysis, the optimal lead set was very similar to a traditional lead set that included precordial and posterior leads. While it may have been disappointing to not find a great improvement, it was still significant to justify one of the body-surface recording tools already in use, that it provided nearly all the information that could be obtained by measuring the ECG everywhere on the body surface at the same time.

Later, I helped develop a medical expert system. In this branch of artificial intelligence, the AI is not self-organizing. Instead, it was an "expert system." It made use of expert knowledge provided by medical doctors, much of it derived from research. The system was able to apply this knowledge to individual cases using lab test results and observations as input data to determine a set of likely diagnoses. The system itself was not making a diagnosis. It was merely suggesting possible diagnoses that doctors could use to guide their own judgement. It could also suggest additional tests and observations to make to help distinguish between possible diagnoses. It was also used to monitor patients and notify the staff when administered medications and lab results indicated developing problems or conflicted with previously known conditions of the patient.

At the time of that work in artificial intelligence, it was very difficult to achieve the kind of results we are seeing today. There just wasn't the kind of hardware needed, since computers today are several orders of magnitude faster and have many orders of magnitude more storage and memory. And especially there was no massive store of data that could be used to train artificial intelligence systems. However, using research papers and building an expert system, while somewhat tedious from a human point of view, it can, within small scale limits, achieve comparable results as a self-organizing system, and since the basis of it is completely under human control using well verified research, would be known to be quite reliable. In comparison, self-organizing systems could be quite unpredictable and inscrutable, even if the results are often amazing.

I have not kept up in detail with current developments in artificial intelligence. So beyond the fantastic advances in computer hardware, there are probably many advances in techniques for building self-organizing artificial intelligence beyond what I have learned and used, but I believe that they are mostly built on top of the foundation that I learned many years ago.

Second Career

The work in expert systems took me into the world of computer programming. While I had learned programming even while in high school, my focus had been more on electronics, shifting to artificial intelligence, and finally years later fully entrenched in the world of programming. After a changes of jobs that progressively took me away from the biomedical fields, I finally landed in the much more lucrative world of financial institutions, working for software companies providing funds transfer and data transmission utilities. There I stayed for the remainder of my career. That was at least as challenging as the previous work, but without some of the luster that the sci-fi-ish world of artificial intelligence provided.

Later in life, my technical abilities lead me to help a few non-profit organizations build their websites. I admit my earlier work in that area was terrible, since I proudly built clever complex one-of systems that nobody else could maintain. I have reformed myself (mostly) and resolved to using boring CMS systems that (almost) anyone can maintain. Still, I cannot resist sticking in a clever bit of code here and there under the pretext that that little bit of code doesn't need anyone to maintain it once it works, and the website will be just fine without it, if need be.

First Hobby

I learned to ski during my university years while on a work assignment in New York in my work/study program. I gradually came to love skiing, and it was one of the most important things in my life. Because of that, I lived several years in Utah during my "first career". I am not good at athletics at all, but through a tremendous amount of practice, I actually became an advanced-expert skier, able to handle almost anything, although my "style" was a bit funky, and towards the end,I kept up with guys nearly half my age. I finally had to quit when I retired, due to economics, and now due to some minor injuries. There are probably a few good stories to tell, once I get down to writing stories.

Second Hobby

Besides all that, I have also been interested in photography, and before the days of electronic image processing, actually developed and creatively printed my own work. However, I haven't had much time for that in many years. But besides the technical side, I also have a not-well-developed artistic side, even though I have only taken a small number of classes in that area. Photography is an interesting subject, because it is both artistic and technical. Perhaps that's why I enjoyed it when I did do a lot of photography. At the time, I was also kind of mentored by an art student, which may be another reason why I don't do photography as much now. Also, you can't make much money doing it unless you become one of the few super famous photographers. As with anything, it takes time and practice to become an expert, and I devoted most of that into computer programming and similar work. Nevertheless, whether technical or artistic, I feel I am a creative person.

A friend once conjectured that there are two kinds of people -- those who excel in technical abilities, and those who excel in art and humanities. I don't agree with that. A technician without the ability to communicate does not make a good analyst or designer. Even a programmer needs to be able to effectively describe what the intentions are in the computer program. Without that, the computer program cannot be maintained, because nobody (including the original programmer after a year or two) can figure out what the code does, or what it is supposed to do. If all we needed to do was write a computer program once and feed it to a computer, all these fancy computer languages would be unnecessary. The computer just follows instructions, and as long as the instructions make the computer give correct results, the computer doesn't care if the language used makes any sense to humans. Writing a computer program should follow the same basic composition rules we learned in high school and college. It's just that in addition to following composition rules, it also needs to follow rules of logic and technical organization to create a defined process. Analysts need to use correct composition even more so, since their reports will be read by many people. So I say that the best people in any field of endeavor use both sides of their brains. At least, I hope I do.

Other Interests

I have also read several books in advanced physics, and am interested in the "interpretation" side of quantum physics, even though professional physicists try to avoid that. I think that there might be an interesting connection between physics (especially quantum) and consciousness/mind. Certainly there are many ideas written about that but most do not stand up to the rigor of real science. The ideas are still interesting as conjectures, if they make any sense at all. I might express some ideas about that too, but they will necessarily have the same lack of scientific rigor, so I am hesitant to say very much about it.

My (non-) Writings

As you may have noticed, at this time (the beginning of 2025), I have not written any actual articles, but I have written several (sometimes very lengthy) comments, and have a number of presumably disappointed followers. One reason for that is that I am bluntly lazy. Or to put it another way, even though I am retired from earning money I spend most of my time engaged with non-profit work, and don't want to spend much time writing such articles.

I believe that, especially in Medium, an article should be well written, and if in contains any factual claims, it should be well researched with proper references. All that, I expect, takes considerable amount of time, at least for me. I see some authors popping out articles every day or so, and I cannot imaging how they have time to do that, except that parts of them look a bit like they might be copy/pasted from books or papers they have previously written. I don't know if that's really true, but I am definitely not a prolific writer, and certainly don't have a reservoir of work to copy from or the ability to hack out a well-written paper in a few minutes. In fact I nearly flunked English classes twice in college. But again, that's because I really didn't like to write the kinds of themes I was assigned to write, and was at a complete loss trying to come up with something to say. Later in life, I've done plenty of writing, mostly, but not all, technical. But rarely have I done the kind of writing that reveals my true self. I can say that that's probably what the real problem was that lead to flunking. Fortunately, today I can be much more open about who I am. I try to drop all pretense about being anyone special.

Etc.

Since Medium does not support direct messages, you may contact me via email at mdm@creig.us, but please don't ask me to buy or invest in anything, and I'm not likely to respond to criticism unless it's constructive. If there's much of that or other spam, this email address will vanish like a black hole.

I am not currently monitoring other social media so if you stumble across any of my accounts there, I probably won't respond even though I have FB, LinkedIn and BlueSky. I quit X(Twitter), and if there's anything else, I've completely forgotten about it.