I’ve been chasing this since before my time in MIT’s Synthetic Characters Group, in a world where nobody used the word “agentic.” This site is where I write up what I’m learning, in case it’s useful to you too. The rest of my life spans cycling, public transit, photography, and fixing my sons’ robots with crazy glue.
New here? Three I’d start with: Galton’s Goalie (my personal 2026 wake-up call, when Claude and I shipped in an afternoon what once took me three months in a research lab), Brand New Renaissance (teaching an AI my photo-editing taste), and Full Ted Lasso (where the real ROI turned out to be my attention). Or just wander the Side Quests below.
Twelve+ surprisingly productive AI side quests since a revelation in January, documented with the “why bother” and lessons learned. Read in any order, but the escalation is part of the story.
Updated often.
The archive: past projects and contributions scattered across the internet, thru 2024. (What I’m building now lives in Side Quests.)
My photos are on Flickr; I’m old school like that. Click thru that link to a mini-gallery.
My projects are on GitHub, I’m on LinkedIn, and I welcome the chance to connect by mail at rob at robburke dot net
New side quests show up in the feed (RSS). I’m old school like that.
me_irl:
At EPAM I’m part of a global team of our key Canadian clients.
In June 2026 I became an Anthropic Claude Certified Architect. The exam mostly confirmed what the side quests are in the process of teaching me.
Just in case it needs saying: all opinions, projects and other shenanigans here are mine, not EPAM’s, unless it says so explicitly.
Before EPAM, I lived in the world of digital systems design at Infusion, a technology innovation leader that’s now part of Avanade. Our focus there was emerging technology for FinServ, Professional Services and Resources industries.
Before that, I was a Microsoft technical evangelist (remember when that was a thing?!), based in Dublin, Ireland.
In grad school I studied artificial intelligence at MIT as part of the Synthetic Characters group at the MIT Media Lab, working toward brain architectures in multi-agent systems inspired by ethology, the study of animal behaviour. After graduating, I designed and built biometric interfaces (EEG, ECG and other) in the MindGames group at MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin, Ireland.
Twenty-five years later I’m building brains for synthetic characters again; the field came back around. (More on that below the fold of the Synthetic Characters page.) The long version, year by year, is here.
Many moons ago I took this “holo-selfie” with a Gen-1 HoloLens while working on Star Trek and Chill. I’ll leave it here for now cuz the HoloLens really takes the years off.
