I'm a complex person, and I feel keenly the passage of time. By nature, this summary is going to leave many facets of my personality, skills, talents, and philosophies out. I'll try to paint a more complete picture in the following sections, but no number of words can completely characterize something as ineffable as a life.
That said, what do you want to learn about me?
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Who are you?
My name is Michael Barnathan. I guess you could call me a computer scientist, though that's sort of incomplete. I actually believe in doing many things to excellence while leaving a trail of accomplishments behind, and CS was just the deepest of many academic interests. I've had an interesting traditional CS career, including senior positions in leadership, engineering, and machine learning, a stint as a Senior Software Engineer at Google, a PhD in ML and computer vision applied to medical imaging, and many startups, one of which led to a rapid acquisition that partially emancipated me and enabled me to exercise a greater degree of discretion in my direction. Behind it all is the drive to make an impact on society and create a world closer to the ideal I envision. If I'm ever empowered to do so, I hope to one day start a university that will train polymathic thinkers at scale, unleashing a modern renaissance upon the world.
That was the vision at one point, anyway. Now I help AI do it at scale.
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What do you do?
It's varied over the years, in part because I constantly and deliberately seek out situations that will stretch my capabilities. I began writing software when I was 8 and released my first large scale successful app at 12, working on it after school hours. Since then, I've also learned several skills to professional levels of competence, including teaching, several branches of medicine (neuroradiology in particular due to my doctoral work), and most construction trades. Now, with over 30 years in software behind me, I spend more time managing teams of engineers, ML/AI engineers, and data scientists, and have generalized my approach in order to stand up engineering teams from zero to product launch really really fast. I've built out teams from 0 to 150.
I sometimes apply this to entrepreneurship, where I've founded two acquired startups. The first of these reached a 7 figure acquisition in 8 months, scaling to survive two appearances on the front page of TechCrunch in the process. The second was a multimodal text-to-video recommender that I created in 2016, years before that was a thing. In total, my work has been featured in TechCrunch (x2), Wired, HackADay, EdSurge, Android Police, VentureBeat, and The Huffington Post. I've also published roughly 20 academic papers across medicine, CS, and biology, and gave roughly 10 leadership talks at colleges around the US. Many of these efforts are in diverse fields outside of computing, particularly medicine and education (which I believe are the fundamental things people need for human progress to manifest beyond access to food, water, and shelter).
The fast speed at which I can operate as an individual, as well as assemble and organize teams, subverts assumptions. This has sometimes unsettled people who weren't expecting it; I operate best in environments where I'm given a mission and a complete green light to implement it as a result. The larger my area of responsibility and fewer gatekeepers I've had to haggle with, the bigger my impact has been on the organizations I've worked with.
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What are your credentials?
I've got a PhD in Computer Science from Temple University, applying tensor decompositions and wavelets to machine learning on medical images in 2010. I've held two Director level jobs, one at a ~1000 person company, and have managed teams of up to 150 people throughout my career. I was also a Senior Software Engineer at Google, working on Bazel and crossing over to three other adjacent projects. I graduated first in my college class, returned two years later to teach at the same college, and started 4 startups, of which two can be said to have succeeded. I managed a 10,000 player online game when I was 12, used REST two years before it was invented, and attained a 7 figure acquisition for myself in under a year. I've played my own compositions at famous concert halls, designed medical devices for monitoring breast cancer and Parkinson's disease, determined the evolutionary lineage of a biofuel gene in algae, and sold my nature and landscape photos commercially. I've founded two nonprofits, both educational.
I have over 30 years of experience in software across the entire stack, 20 years of experience in machine learning and AI, and ~15 years of experience in engineering management. For more detail, see my resume.
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Are you looking for work?
I'm sometimes open to positions at or above the Director level - let's talk!
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How about research collaborations?
A lot of my research is in AI, bioinformatics, and evolution from both biological and computational perspectives. I have a number of novel ideas in these domains which I've been pursuing over the span of years to decades. I'm open to collaborating with researchers who share the same view of doing great things over moderately long spans of time (and I'm happy to allow for checkpoints midway if needed to do so practically or secure funding; I understand the need for that).
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Will you help me learn AI?
I often teach AI engineering - most recently at inference.ai academy
I sometimes help individually, but the time commitment today is hard to spare. Feel free to ask and I will let you know.
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What's with all of this “polymath” stuff?
I'd like to be known as a polymath through my work one day, though I don't yet merit the title, and I'm unsure if it's even relevant with stronger and stronger AI systems emerging. I will simply focus on expressing myself and doing good work, and will let the output speak for itself.
My thought processes most closely echo those of Henri Poincaré - like Poincaré, intuition rather than logic is my primary foundation of understanding, with deductive reasoning playing a strong supporting role but not a starring one. The universality of both my approach and Poincaré's is likely a direct result of this, and in fact, I strongly believe that anyone who is able to think in this way can learn nearly anything because intuition is intrinsically universal.
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How can I contact you?
If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can email me at michael@barnathan.net.