In 2001 I was building brains for synthetic characters at the MIT Media Lab, back when nobody said “agentic.” Twenty-five years later I’m doing it again, with a lot more help.
New here? Three I’d start with: Galton’s Goalie (my 2026 wake-up call, an afternoon with Claude matching three months of my work in a research lab), Brand New Renaissance (teaching an AI my photo-editing taste), and Full Ted Lasso (where the real ROI was my attention). Or just wander the Side Quests below.
Fifteen+ surprisingly productive AI side quests since January, each with the “why bother” and what I learned. Newest first, and the escalation is part of the story.
The archive: two decades of projects, thru 2024. What I’m building now lives in Side Quests.
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, too.
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.
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 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.
