Ben Vierck#
About#
Founder of Positronic AI — enterprise AI, deep learning, and LLMs. Former VP of Engineering at Fujitsu; began on Microsoft's Windows team.
Bio#
My career began on Microsoft's Windows Build team [3] in the late 1990s, compiling an operating system that would run on hundreds of millions of desktops. In the thirty years since, I've alternated between leading engineering inside large companies and founding my own. Each has sharpened the other.
As Vice President of Engineering at a Fujitsu subsidiary [1], I led a hundred-person organization, held a seat on the executive team reporting to the CEO, and shepherded the company through its move from on-premise systems to the cloud.
I founded Positronic AI and grew it, without outside capital, to a million dollars a year in deep-learning work that was never academic: diagnosing disease in EEGs, catching counterfeit coins, predicting from video the movements that precede an accident. Five patent applications [4] came out of those years. One of the clients — the owner of the EEG company — thought enough of the work to become an investor, putting in a million dollars and taking over sales.
That investment built lit.ai, an enterprise AI platform that runs entirely on a customer's own infrastructure. Out of building it came one more patent: a way to use a language model to tune a neural network's training in real time, while it is still running. Patent pending…
Software#
- Positronic LIT.AI: A platform for building deep learning models.
- Fujitsu Capture Server (PaperStream Server): A web-based document processing platform that enables organizations to capture, process, and introduce business-critical content into their systems. It offers features like document separation, classification, extraction, and data release, automating many of the manual steps in document processing.
- Devfarm PowerWF, PowerSE, PowerVI: PowerShell script authoring and management tools.
- Quest Benchmark Factory, Foglight Transaction Recorder: Database and web server load testing tools.
- Microsoft Windows: Operating system.
Patents#
Positronic AI — real-time hyperparameter tuning of neural-network training via language models
U.S. Patent Application No. 19/360,775 (provisional 63/708,059) — Patent Pending
Clinical EEG deep learning — co-authored for Stratus / Merln
A body of five patent applications introducing novel techniques for training artificial neural networks on EEG signal data: hot-swapping irregular segments, probabilistic sample weighting, pooled frequency downsampling, adaptive feature clipping, and adaptive normalized PSD. Three matured to published U.S. applications:
US-20240112023-A1 — Preserving signals in data inputs with moderate-to-high variances in data sequence lengths for artificial neural network model training
US-20230177325-A1 — Preserving signals for artificial neural networks when downsampling
US-20230316072-A1 — Artificial neural network for sparse data processing
Talks#
Software Engineering Nankai University Guest Lecture
This personal perspective on the history of Software Engineering follows the state of Software Engineering from its birth in 1968 through the present. The content of this talk was heavily influenced by Paulo Perrota's talk at the 2012 Ruby Conference.
Publications and Articles#
- VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration by Luc Dekens (First Edition, Chapter 22)
- Essential Blogging published by O'Reilly (Acknowledgement)
- Artificial Intelligence for Humans by Jeff Heaton (Acknowledgement)
- Microsoft Scripting Blog Articles:
- "PSImaging Part 1: Test-Image" - March 19, 2015
- "PowerTip: Read .exe Magic Number with PowerShell" - March 19, 2015
- "PSImaging Part 2: Export-Text from Images" - March 20, 2015
- "PSImaging Part 3: Group-ImageFile" - March 21, 2015
Conferences and Events#
- Gartner Symposium IT Forum 2019 (Attendee)
- FIRST Robotics Competition: Deep Space, 2019 (Judge & Speaker)
- StartupGrind Global 2018 Top 50 Startup (Top 20 Finalist)
- StampedeCon 2017 (Speaker)
- AIIM Conference 2014 (Speaker)
- Title: "Ensure Your SharePoint Implementation is a Recipe for Success"
- Date: Wednesday, April 2nd (2:00-2:30pm)
- Microsoft TechEd 2014 (Exhibitor)
- Sharepoint Conference 2014 (Exhibitor)
- Microsoft System Center Alliance ISV Partner 2013 (Exhibitor)
- Microsoft Management Summit 2011 (Exhibitor)
- Microsoft Management Summit 2010 (Exhibitor)
- Microsoft TechEd 2010 (Exhibitor)
- VMWorld 2009 (Exhibitor, Speaker)
- Interactive St Louis 2009 (Speaker)