I retired (my last job was Master Software Engineer and the manager of a deep learning team at Capital One) a year ago April and was enjoying time with friends and family, doing personal research in hybrid AI, lots of writing, and volunteering at our local food bank. I stopped my volunteer work with COVID-19 and welcomed the opportunity last month to start work at Olive AI working on a very strong Knowledge Graph team.

My wife Carol and I have been practicing social distancing and wearing masks for shopping for over 5 months now. Welcome to the new normal and a crazy world in which entertaining and seeing friends is done by meeting in people’s yards and everyone bringing their own “meal in a bag.” I enjoy writing so I have been updating my recent books, starting with Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer’s Secret Weapon and A Lisp Programmer Living in Python-Land: The Hy Programming Language.

Here are some of my of my recent notes that might save you some time, or teach you a new trick. I have had good results using the py4cl library if I wrap API calls to TensorFlow or spaCy in a short Python library that calls Python libraries and returns results in simple types like strings and dictionaries. I just committed a complete example (Python library and Common Lisp client code) to the public repo for my book Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer’s Secret Weapon that will be added to the next edition of my book.

As an author I find occasional use of Facebook and Twitter to be useful for “broadcasting” notifications of my new books, open source projects, etc. I also find gmail to be useful for some types of email. Still, I do like to take a few easy steps to push back a little against the free use of my web behavioral data to profit corporations who I don’t do business with (and those I do):

Hello everyone, I wish everyone a happy and healthy new year! Here are my predictions for the next ten years: Wearable devices like the Apple Watch will become widely used and because of user pushback we will see company’s like Apple, Google, Toshiba, Huawei, Samsung, etc. start to support standards that allow, for example, an Apple Watch to interact with a Samsung TV. Further, I expect a single personal device (watch or phone) to be for most users a connection hub that interacts with public kiosks, displays, input devices, etc.

I retired this spring after working on artificial intelligence projects since the 1980s. Freedom from having to work on large projects for other people and companies is liberating and frees up time for thinking about new ideas. Currently I am most interested in deep learning models for generating and evaluating recipes - for now I am using a GAN model (which I am calling RecipeGAN). When I managed a deep learning team at Capital One, I used GANs to synthesize data.

My wife and I returned to our home in Sedona Arizona in June. I had been managing a deep learning team for Capital One in Champaign Illinois (in the research park at UIUC). I am now retired so we moved back into our house in the mountains in Central Arizona. re: retirement: while I will might still do small interesting consulting jobs, I am retired. I am spending my time volunteering at a local food bank, hiking and kayaking with my friends, and I joined a local writers group to give myself a shove to finish a sci-fi book I have been working on for a long time.

You might wonder what the topics of my large Haskell + Python project KGcreator and auto code formatting have to do with each other. I addition to working on two Python books (Python Intelligent Systems and Deep Learning and Graph Databases), my main ‘retirement’ activity has been write a lot of Haskell code and a smaller amount of Python code for my KGcreator project. After reading a discussion on Hacker News yesterday about Python code tidy/auto-format tools, I decided to add Makefile targets.

With deep gratitude for a great company and a great job, I retired from my role as manager of the UIUC machine learning team and Master Software Engineer. Capital One has deep machine learning talent so check them out if you are looking for ML work. Thanks especially to my team for being interesting to work with and for the kind going away gift of locally made Go Ban board, bowls, and Go stones.

For about 25 years my digital life was wrapped tightly around whatever personal laptop I had. Since for most of that time I worked as a remote consultant (except for gigs at Singapore-based Ola Search, Google in Mountain View, and currently at Capital One in Urbana, Illinois) my personal laptop also covered work activities. There was something close and comforting about having one digital device that I relied on. Digital life is very different now.