I measure things that are hard to measure.

Twenty years quantifying how information is encoded in the mammalian retina, then a decade building production software. The through-line is measurement: deciding what a number means, what it misses, and whether you should act on it.

I hold a PhD in visual neuroscience from the University of Washington and spent my research career on retinal ganglion cell physiology, sodium channel expression, and electrical stimulation of neural tissue — including the world-first demonstration that diamond electrodes can activate retinal neurons, work toward a bionic vision prosthesis. Since 2015 I have worked in industry, most recently architecting and clinically validating a smartphone pupillometry system whose accuracy was established against a clinical-standard instrument in a peer-reviewed study.

Convolutional networks were derived from the visual system I spent two decades studying. When an off-the-shelf model fails, I can usually say something useful about why.

Elsewhere

I build things outside work, and I build them alone. Hey Neighbour, a community app for caravan travellers, live on iOS and Android. Pluck, meal planning with conversational recipe creation, through to TestFlight and Google Play beta. getpaid, a payment gateway on Cloudflare Workers, in production with its first client. And Robot Combat Events, which I have built and operated for the global combat-robotics community since 2017.