More than 20 years ago, fresh out of school in the 90s, I built artificial intelligence (AI) systems for a military contractor. I trained neural nets, used natural language processing to populate decision support systems, experimented with genetic algorithms, and refined support vector machines. In…
Let me start off by agreeing that yes, the network is slow. I’ve moved a fair amount of data over the years. Even when it’s only a terabyte or two, the network always seems uncomfortably slow. We never seem to get the performance we sketched…
I’ve spent most of my career on the uncomfortable edge of technology. This meant that I was often the one who got to deal with gear that was being pushed into production just a little bit too early, just a little bit too fast, and…
There’s a particular class of problem that I’ve grappled with regularly over the past decade. I got to go another round just before the holiday break. I figured that this was as good a time as any to share some thoughts. Multiple representations Some file…
Yesterday, I got to solve a puzzle that I’ve solved more than a few times before. “How do we get a moderate amount of data from here to there in reasonably short order?” The specifics in this sort of puzzle change all the time. What…
I had the opportunity to write a white paper for Elastifile about the challenges and opportunities as we shift large quantities of genomic data from traditional on-premise NAS systems to the cloud. If that’s the sort of thing that interests you, check it out here:…
Some blockchain implementations – public, non-permissioned ones in particular – have a really interesting property: Nobody owns them. As a sentence, it’s a simple statement. There is no owner. As I’ve considered it, however, this is far more subtle and powerful than merely having a…
Nobody cares about the cloud. It’s a statement that requires a bit of explanation – since “the cloud” is so ubiquitous. I see it advertised on highway billboards, in airport concourses, and everywhere in between. I believe that my current resume and LinkedIn profile may…
I had the opportunity to write a guest blog post for Elastifile. It’s about the fact that a lot of the data in the life sciences is housed on big NFS fileservers. It has been challenging to shift our workflows, which rely both on the…
I’ve been reading Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier. It’s a good book, and you should probably read it. It’s particularly important if you’re a person who participates in the economy – which is most of us. Among the good points he makes is…