About

I'm primarily a scientist and an engineer. I'm most interested in solving problems relevant to long-term, desirable futures for humanity.

I believe that technology has always been a primary driver of positive change for humanity by creating wealth, improving living standards, fighting disease, and multiplying available energy sources.

Over the next decade and possibly longer, the most consequential technology will be artificial intelligence. Though it comes with undeniable risks, it will also function as a force multiplier for human ingenuity, allowing us to solve more problems, and more difficult problems.

A long-term, flourishing humanity must be anchored to a planet with a stable holocene-like climate. This a generational challenge, but I believe that humanity will ultimately arrest and reverse climate change, though not without great struggle.

My current work focusses on applications of artificial intelligence to remote sensing. I seek to understand how our planet is changing, and to build tools for climate change mitigation, disaster response, and maintaining peace and security.

Current Work

• Applying artificial intelligence at Planet Labs to space-based remote sensing to better understand how our planet is changing and make change actionable.
• Running the Vancouver chapter of the Ai Salon , hosting small-group discussions and events on the sociological, economic, cultural, and philosophical impacts and meaning of AI developments.
• Advising startups and mentoring founders, data scientists, and engineers, including via the Frontier Development Lab .
• Writing at The Impatient Futurist and Towards Data Science .

Past Work

• Co-founded Paladin AI , an applied AI startup in the aerospace sector that used machine learning to accelerate the training of commercial pilots. I served as the Chief Technology Officer and led a core team of software engineers and data scientists. Our instructional platform (InstructIQ) and related technology was later acquired by TXT e-Solutions.
• Co-authored Mining the Social Web, 3rd Edition , published in 2019 by O'Reilly Media. The book teaches a wide range of data mining techniques using the Python programming language. Techniques include natural language processing, web scraping, computer vision, and data visualization.

Academic Work

• Simulating Radiative Feedback and the Formation of Massive Stars

  This thesis is a study of massive star formation: the environments in which they form and the effect that their radiation feedback has on their environments. We present high-performance supercomputer simulations of massive star formation inside molecular cloud clumps and cores.

  Ph.D. thesis, completed in 2016. Advisor: Ralph Pudritz

• Simulating Radiative Feedback and the Formation of Massive Stars

  Stars form in clusters amidst complex and coupled physical phenomena. Among the most important of these is radiative feedback, which heats the surrounding gas to suppress the formation of many low-mass stars. In simulations of star formation, pre-main-sequence modeling has often been neglected and stars are assumed to have the radii and luminosities of zero-age main sequence stars.

  M.Sc. thesis, completed in 2011. Advisors: Ralph Pudritz, James Wadsley, Christine Wilson

• For a list of my publications, see my Google Scholar profile.