Gene Chalfant

🟢 Robotic autonomy engineer and AI research and development
🟢 President of Skystone Group, a nexus for innovation
🟢 Former NASA/JPL researcher, CTO of i2020 FinTech
🟢 Degreed in computer science/AI and business administration
🟢 Certified in civil engineering, green building, piloting, music...
🟢 Experienced in mobile/web dev, digital finance, LLMs, space applications ...

I'm incredibly fortunate to have been at the center of some of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. Innovation at its best!

I worked with extraordinary people and teams who inspire me to this day. Here are some of my own contributions:

• Galileo Mission to Jupiter and its moons →

  I led the tiger team of software developers who built the onboard image compressor for Galileo. Prior to the major antenna malfunction, a high bandwidth channel allowed uncompressed image and science downloads. We were fixers. My team wrote and uploaded new code to the spacecraft in Jupiter orbit. Our group controlled all thrusters, cameras, and motors, keeping everything pointed in the right direction.

• Rovers on Mars →

  My job: Research autonomy for camera-laden robots in space and rovers on planet surfaces. First eyes on many of the early daily photos downloaded from Mars rovers. Wrote and published NASA's first website covering daily events during the journey of both rovers on Mars with live tracking, photos, and commentary.

• Autonomous Landing Simulator →

  I wrote a high fildelity graphic simulation to test landing site selection during descent and landing on true or simulated terrain. Autonomous landings are required because of radio lag and lack of high resolution surface maps.

• Attractor Superdynamics to Describe Intelligence →

  A paper I wrote as a PhD candidate during the Connectionism movement in AI. At the time this was a radical new idea. Today all AIs are built this way - as enormous networks of simple nodes. Published by Bernardo Huberman in his Virtual Journal at Xerox PARC.

• Radars in Space →

  I built control and analysis software for this bus-sized 12 ton space imaging radar that occupied two entire Space Shuttle missions to look at and beneath Earth's surface. Archaeologists used this to discover the Lost City of Ubar, buried under sand for thousands of years.

On Artificial Intelligence

We're on the brink of building embodied AI -- robots -- superhuman in behavior. A model exists in the brain's perception of movement and the dynamics of the world.

Strong AI will also come from their ability to instantly and seamlessly collaborate.

When we interact with AI, whether a robot or an online entity, we will be sharing autonomy. Exactly how we give up the reins will be critical as we inexorably move forward.

Here's a few essays on AI that align with my thoughts, by people I greatly respect.

• Machines of Loving Grace →

  Another optimistic view of humanity's future and how AI can help us. By Dario Amodei of Anthropic.

• Spatial Intelligence →

  Fei-Fei Li on intelligence through vision, not language, in the manner of animals.

• Interpretability Dreams →

  A technical article by Chris Olah on MechInterp and parallels between brain anatomy and activation structures in AIs.