Hi!,
My name is Daniel Fernandes Gomes, I was born in 94 and I’m from S. Paio de Oleiros; a northen, near the coast, Portuguese town. Though, many times you may also find me using my alias, Danfergo, which is the agglutination of my full name.
My memories begin with me launching my little toy cars against the wall and playing with everything else I could find at home. Tying chairs and tables with wool yarn was a trend back then.
Around eight, I’ve my bike’s tire flattened and from their on that was my main toy. I’ve self-learned how to take it apart, fix it and a few years later reinventing it as a tricycle with a steering wheel from an old car.
At this age, I was studying at the elementary schools of S. Paio de Oleiros and Santa Maria de Lamas (latest year) while attending “sunday school”, which I kept attending until my 9th grade.
The next studying cycles happened at Colégio Liceal de Santa Maria de Lamas, where I was doing enough to keep reasonable grades while I would be joining a few clubs, in different years: history, english and arts. A lot more seriously, I’ve joined theatre group where I stayed until the end of the high-school, performing during 5 and half years, around 10 different plays.
At 15, when the social network Hi5 was at its pick, I’ve found the CSS “codes” and browser source view. I was amazed by It and I’ve embarked on this new learning through hacking path. About a year latter I was publishing tutorials on Youtube and on TOUTLOUD, a forum which I created with the help of a few friends and reached around 2500 users. This motivated me to learn my first programming languages: JavaScript and Php. The forum died when the social network disabled HTML/CSS support.
Around this age I joined the handball teams, at school and at CDC S. Paio de Oleiros though, for logistic reasons It didn’t last one full year. Next I took on classic guitar lessons at TUNA Musical Group from S. Paio de Oleiros, for two years. This led me to, with friends, create COCKAINE,a rock music band. I left after a few months.
Since early, I’ve questioned every conception it was purposed to me — that’s stupid, was my usual welcome message. But more than put in question I love to propose, dream about and build my own ideas. Specially for problems that even after long periods of reflection keep staying stupid.
At my ninth grade I started questioning students association and that led me to, at eleventh, with the help of friends, run for president. Why not?… And we totally lost. But with the lessons learned and contacts established we decided to run once again. We won. I was the president of students association that year; and what a year we: organized two major parties (w/ crowds over 1500 people), a LAN Party sponsored by the town hall and an ISP provider, provided logistic support and were the representatives on the national secondary festival, as well other smaller events.
From early I wanted to be an engineer and he only options where what branch: mechanical, electrical, computers, etc. Though, three main points quickly help me take that decision:
When the university came, my marks weren’t enough to enter the faculty I have initially chosen, Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto (FEUP). Yet I was able to enter a neighbour school, Institute of Engineering of Porto, where I made the first year. Then I requested transfer to FEUP were I’m making the final four years of the course Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering.
Meanwhile I’ve been participating with friends, each year, on the Porto Summer Of Code competition, having conquered the second place on the first attempt. I’ve also been participating in other middle year competitions.
Since the summer of 2015 I’ve also been working with university professors, under three initiation research grants, on a web platform for the support of wind flow modeling experimental campaigns. Here the technologies used were AngularJS and NodeJS based.
About ten years after my last update, I’m about to conclude my PhD.
Believing that the world of new software apps was mostly solved, my curiosity with AI and Robotics, and the pursuit of understanding the meaning of life, I’ve found a PhD opportunity in the UK and jumped into it.
The initial plan was to investigate the manipulation of deformable objects using vision, towards a universal manipulator machine that could be used to automate most manual tasks, particularly home chores such as laundry folding. This way, parents could have a bit more free time to raise their kids, resulting in a happier next generation. Though, I ended up falling the into rabbit hole of tactile sensing and tactile sensors.
Tactile sensing is (we believe) an highly important sensing capability for robots, helping in reducing the uncertainty associated with other remote sensing modalities, such as camera-based sensing. However, tactile sensors are still at its infancy, and much work is still necessary to create robots with fully body tactile sensing, as well as of understanding the importance of tactile sensing in learning. I’ve carried out research on extending existing sensors designs, models to enable learning in simulation, and future-predictive models that can be trained end-to-end without human supervision.
Beyond that, Robotics and AI are quite a vast fields, and I missed the clear architectures that the world of software has gotten me used to. In the pursuit of understanding the several topics of each research field, and addressing the resolution difference between tactile sensing and vision, I started drawing some diagrams and mind-maps, and suddenly the image of the eye of providence showed up in my diagrams.
This week or so of deep thinking resulted in the biggest eureka of my life, I thought, and it took me around one year or so just to unpack it. I tried to write down what I was thinking back then quite a few times, but it seems I’m never able to write the complete story, and disassociate it from my personal life.
But, one quick summary is: from a reinforcement learning perspective, where does the source of all rewards/motivation comes from? What drives all the (human) motion? On the other hand, the everything (universe, multiverse, everything …) is an infinite space both spatially and temporally, and motion must always exist, otherwise we could always ask where does it beginnings or ends, and that’s absurd because we could always ask what’s beyond/outside that? As such, there must be rules in place that ensure that motion always exist. Let’s call it mathematics of motion … or physics? I would like to call it Intelligence. The set of all forces and constraints that govern the three-dimensional space we exist in. You can also call it natural evolution; wait, natural evolution wasn’t (just) about biology and genetics?
From a global perspective the everything is an infinite volume, the everything moves and the everything interacts with itself. From a local perspective, each local ripple or set of ripples must develop resistance to ensure that it isn’t squashed by the surrounding ripples. One natural consequence is that each local thing must develop a capability to avoid its own extinction. Having the capability to anticipate the future, i.e. to anticipate the movement of surrounding ripples is a must. The issue is, thinking far away, requires a lot of computation, and ideally we would like to anticipate far away future effortlessly. You see? The eye is the capability of anticipating the future, and the triangle is the consequent necessary hierarchy that naturally emerges. Now, go around, and note how many structures are naturally hierarchical. That’s the meaning of the eye of providence symbol. I think.
One ahmm happy? sad? confusing? something? conclusion of all this understanding is that life is an impossible game. Human life is a finite existence within an infinite optimization game. Our objective is to ensure that we stay in motion, and that we keep our surrounding environment in motion, for as long as we can. Though, eventually, we and our local environment will stop. This is probably the one thing in my life that I must don’t like, but I cannot disagree with.
Anyway, with this new knowledge, returning home (mostly metaphorically) became a bit of a conflicting experience. Many things seem to be out of tune, and it becomes challenging to know what
One tangent to all of this academic adventure, but actually quite entangled to the whole story, are some software apps I’ve been experimenting with. Looking into the real world and seeing so many things that require improvement, it is frustrating no being able to make them better. While these apps have stayed as experiments so far, I’d say they helped me understanding the concept of value and the importance of gathering real world feedback for validating my ideas. While in the past I used to think about good and bad as absolute concepts, with at some point the research question being: what makes the best app? Now I see that a good app is the one that fulfills the desires of its clients. Hence, understanding what clients want and need is, it seems, the key challenge.
This a bit of who I am and what I do. At least so far.
If you think that you might have common interests with me, or that I’m upsetting you in some way, don’t hesitate in contacting me. I’m here to help.
Stay Fair,
Daniel