My name is Rob Bennett. While it’s hard to summarize a person with a few bullet-points, I’ll try:
- I am a former culinarian, with near 30 years in the field!
- I’m a trained sommelier, and fine wine and distilled spirits to be interesting.
- I deeply enjoy role-playing games, including but not limited to D&D, White-Wolf, and Shadowrun
- The Theory of Mind, evolutionary biology, and philosophy are pet topics of mine and I’m always willing to chat about them.
- The intersection between Machine Learning and biological learning is deeply fascinating to me.
My History
I started my professional career at the ripe old age of 9, working for my dad in his kitchens. His thirteenth birthday present to me was a job as a dishwasher. I was thrilled. Truly. Over the years, I’ve added many subjects of study to my conversational knowledge, but I have a special love for philosophy. I adore Nihilistic, Existential or Absurdist thought. I spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of my existence, or human existence, or do we exist. You get the idea. In the summer of 2017, I read a book called Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and it shifted my world view. It sparked an interest in evolutionary biology, the human mind, and the social animals that we are. I live in Seattle, and have many friends in the tech world. One conversation led to another, and the link between evolution, the ‘mind’, and machine learning was eventually bridged. After a few years of supporting my life partner finish her Pharmacy school, I was able to pursue my own education in data science. And here we are. In October of 2019, I had my first (and probably last) child, Arius. He is an absolute delight and watching him develop has only strengthened my desire to learn how we learn, and more importantly, how we can teach something else to learn. Thank you for taking the time to read about me.