The story begins before my time in MIT’s Synthetic Characters Group, in a world where nobody used the word “agentic.”
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. The rest of my life spans cycling, public transit, photography, and fixing my sons’ robots with crazy glue.
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.
