The World According to Pip
This is another in our series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. Mike Pritchard is bestowing the honor on us this week and if you like what he has to say, you can find more of his writing (and photography) on his blog.
So, what is a day in the life of Lijit like? My name is Mike “Pip” Pritchard, I’m the tech lead for the ad server team, and if you’re been following the blog here, you’ll realize that we’ve been pretty busy. Crazy busy, in fact, but we’re excited that we’re working on projects that are helping grow Lijit and create revenue for both Lijit and our publishers. And we have some great projects in the pipeline that you’ll get to hear about as we roll them out!
I’ve been at Lijit since October and I came to Lijit from a non-traditional background for a web startup. You see, I’ve come from a strong AI background and have spent most of my career building robots for either the DoD or NASA! Weird, but true.
I’ve built tiny robots, flying robots, crawling robots, industrial robots. So how did I end up at Lijit and why? Well, I love working in the AI field. The more we learn about biological intelligence the more it seems to be incredibly parallel in nature, the human brain seems to be a vast collection of independently functioning systems (structures of neural networks) working together in a fairly chaotic way, with the emergent behavior being intelligence, or at least what we think is intelligence. Almost like if we were to throw billions of computers together all connected to each other something would emerge from the chaos, something very unexpected. Sound familiar?
Well, that is for the future, but for today humanity has created this vast connected mass (or mess) of information and computers that we’re only beginning to organize. Maybe we’re not organizing it, but its organizing itself. Just like many complex biological systems we see in nature, it is perhaps a self-organizing system and it seems to be organizing itself around structures like social networks.
This, of course, is why Lijit is so important. Lijit is the natural evolution of this process, and allows us to search through these social networks in a more meaningful and useful way. This is why its an exciting time, and Lijit is a cool place to be…
(Photo used with CC license courtesy of: Dan Coulter)
