Author: benvigoda
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The Q@YS
One of my very favorite things to do is playing with The Q@YS. When people ask me what sort of music we play, I say, it’s a cross between the Grateful Dead and Radio Head! But that’s just really just a way of saying we try to be open with each other in the moment…
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TED Talk
When Machines Have Ideas, 2016 “When we build stories into machine intelligence systems, we should enable them to attach probabilities to their stories. Weighing alternatives stories is important, because it builds solid foundations. If the system weighs stories against each other and sometimes returns to earlier stories, readjusting them or reconsidering its beliefs, then the…
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Games for Song
Games for Song is a collection of games for collaborative musical improvisation. Let a game become a song.
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Design That Matters
In 2001 I asked some friends at the MIT what would happen if, hypothetically, we were to give an MIT technology tour for a visiting Bangladesh women’s collective. This question led to a student-led for-credit seminar to engage engineering students with developing technologies for under-served communities, then a global conference involving NGOs from thirteen countries,…
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Family Halloweens
We make costumes for halloween
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5 Tiger Morning
I used AI to generate scenes for this short film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep3PhY35nyA. Original music by improvised by my bandmates and I, Quality at Your Service (q@ys).
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Established and Ran Corporate Research Labs at ADI
After my startup Lyric Semiconductor was acquired by Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), it became a growing machine learning chipset division. During my time there, I also established a corporate research labs, started a venture capital group, and led the first investment (a MEMs-based mass spectrometer on a chip). I modeled the “Analog Garage” after a…
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The First Deep Learning Processors (Created for DARPA)
We developed the world’s first deep learning processing units for machine learning, providing approximately 1,000x Joules per Operation wins for deep learning. On a range of image processing and signal processing benchmarks, we demonstrated 10x more operations per second (OPS) and 100x lower power (Joules per operation) compared to the leading Nvidia GPU of the…
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The Only *Analog* Deep Learning Processors (And Why Bother?)
I led the creation what is still the largest analog integrated circuit in history. 440,000 analog transistors did the work of 30,000,000 digital transistor tensor processing core, providing an additional 10x Joules/Ops power win for the first deep learning microchips. In 2010, this core was a plug-and-play substitute for the processing core in the first…
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Jamioki
Is it possible to improvise a symphony? We made technology to let it become possible.
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The Mustn’t Grumble
Avant-garde folk Parisian swing music. Listen to us play on Hudson Valley National Public Radio Live at the Linda. With over 500,000 monthly listeners, WAMC ranks among the most-listened-to public radio stations in the United States.
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Experimental Musical Instrument Workshop at MIT
I led the Experimental Musical Instruments Workshop At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and hosted John Zorn as our Guest Artist. Many of our new instruments were playable, but didn’t yet have any manner of musical notation. The question was therefore, “How do we learn to play these instruments in an ensemble?” We used John Zorn’s…
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Virtual Juggling for the Flying Karamazov Brothers
I built the first virtual juggling system for the Flying Karamazov Brothers, and they toured with it for over a decade. I wrote the code in C++ and OpenCV. At the time it required us to assemble the most sophisticated GPU cluster available; There was no such thing as a GPU cloud and even if…
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Drum-o-Saurus
The problem with drums in the city is they are too large for small spaces, and too loud for the neighbors! Plus drums are heavy and bulky to move. The problem with digital/electronic drums is that they are not like playing real drums. They feel like holding your lover’s hand with pliers. No feel. No…