I build teams where people and AI agents work side by side.
At the MIT Media Lab, my thesis explored giving a virtual creature a sense of time. Now I’m building AI characters for home and work, with a lot more help. These are my experiments: what worked, what I learned, and where you can start.
Client Partner and Head of Public Sector Accounts in Canada at EPAM, formerly Microsoft. Also swim-meet photographer, road cyclist, husband, and fixer of our sons’ robots.
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Literal Curveballs
For this month’s Engineering Hustle, my son and I took the last CrunchLabs box of the season out for a walk to school. Everyone loves a season finale that ties in themes of the previous episodes.. and throws a few curveballs along the way!
Read it: Literal Curveballs
Recently
All 23 side quests-
Old Dogs, Newer Tricks
Twenty-five years later, Silas, Duncan, Goatzilla and the whole cast of characters reunite on the Isle of Man’s Best Friend.
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From Assistant to Partner
The season’s first swim meet, 2,814 photographs, and AI partners that took on the toil so I could stay the photographer.
New here? Start with
Galton’s Goalie
My 2026 wake-up call: an afternoon with Claude matching three months of my work in a research lab.
AI-Assisted Travel
Eighteen days in Japan with AI assistants along. They had to support the trip, not steer it.
frenkit, finally.
The thesis, 25 years on: an agent built for staying, on the bet that a character is made of time.
Photographs
me_irl:
At EPAM I’m a Client Partner and Head of Public Sector Accounts in Canada, part of a global team of digital product engineering, data, AI and automation specialists. The rest of my life spans cycling, public transit, photography, and fixing my sons’ robots with crazy glue.
The transit part is daily (bus to GO train, or bus to subway), and this August it got its own field notebook: Japan by Rail.
In June 2026 I earned Anthropic’s Claude Certified Architect (Foundations) certification. 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 for virtual characters, 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 since the HoloLens really takes the years off.