SYNTHETIC ORGANISMS
TARIN ZIYAEE
is a technologist and investor interested in fostering alternative AI paradigms to the ones that dominate today. Tarin led Apple’s Autonomous Vehicle (AV) early perception team, and was CTO of Voyage (acquired by Cruise). Tarin was also Director R&D at CTRL-Labs (acquired by Meta) leading research on spike-decoding algorithms for neural interfaces. He has fielded perception technologies around RADAR and SONAR for the US Army Research Labs and for the Naval Underwater Warfare Center (NUWC) as part of NATO defense efforts. As CEO of Neurosys, he worked on developing neural spike-sorting algorithms for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to understand brain encoding of visual information. Currently, Tarin leads a team at Meta Research Labs working on neural interface decoding.
FILIP PIEKNIEWSKI
Computer vision researcher and engineer interested in visual object tracking and broadly the problem of visual perception. Filip is an enthusiast of machine learning but also recognizes the limitations of our current paradigms. He received Phd from Warsaw University, was into perceptrons in early 2000's when they were not cool, decided to learn neuroscience instead. He moved to San Diego to an early stage startup Brain Corporation and read and modeled hundreds of neuroscience papers which is where he draws inspiration for new types of architectures. In 2015 he lead a DARPA grant which concluded with a development of Predictive Vision Model, an example of a new kind, bio-inspired yet useful machine learning architectures. In the meanwhile he has also been a vocal critic of excessive hype in the broad AI since 2015 writing a popular and sometimes controversial blog. Filip is currently at a San Diego based Accel Robotics where he leads a team working on visual shopper tracking in an automated cashier-less retail store.
TODD HYLTON
Todd Hylton is an adjunct professor at UC San Diego and consultant for early stage, unconventional computing technology companies. He is a persistent advocate and author of the idea that thermodynamics should drive the self-organization of computing systems and that generalized artificial intelligence is impossible in the current computing paradigm. Earlier, he was Executive Vice President of Strategy and Research at Brain Corporation, a San Diego-based robotics startup. From 2007 to 2012, Dr. Hylton served as a Program Manager at DARPA where he started the SyNAPSE, Physical and Nano Air Vehicle programs. Prior to DARPA, he ran a nanotechnology research group at SAIC, co-founded a specialty semiconductor equipment business, and served as CTO of Commonwealth Scientific Corporation. Dr. Hylton received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1991 and his B.S. in Physics from M.I.T. in 1983.