Unleashing the Power of Mind and Machine with Travis DeWolf, Cofounder and COO of ABR
Picture this…
Water has started to engulf everything in its path and you’re right in the middle of it, pushing past the waves, trying to stay above it. You realize that the landscape that was once so familiar to you is now unrecognizable. But, up in the air, you see a glimmer of hope; you see autonomous drones hover above you. They’re equipped with high-tech sensors that help them navigate in a flood-type situation like this and rescue stranded individuals like you to safety. It’s a search and rescue first responder assistant drone. You’re saved! 🥳
But how does this relate to this post? In our most recent interview, we talked to someone that has been an avid team member of this project for a few years now. Meet Travis DeWolf, co-founder and COO of Applied Brain Research (ABR).
Travis earned a PhD from the University of Waterloo, where he focused primarily on computational neuroscience at Professor Chris Eliasmith’s Computational Neuroscience Research Group (CNRG). And that’s actually where he met his cofounders of ABR.
That group had a cohort of five or six of us that came through and started the company together with Peter Suma — a seasoned entrepreneur business guy who came to the lab, saw the commercial potential early on, and said we should make a company here.
Applied Brain Research (ABR) 🧠
Applied Brain Research (ABR) is essentially building brain chips. I know that doesn’t make too much sense, but here’s how Travis described it:
The product we’re building right now; the algorithm came from neuroscience research. It’s an algorithm that represents time series signals. It was developed by a colleague at the lab, Aaron Voelker, and our supervisor Chris Eliasmith.
Time series signals are basically information that changes over time. They put this into a neural network and can beat state of the art performance on a large number of different tasks. And that’s just the software side of things. Believe it or not, they’re also building the hardware; a brain-like chip that can run algorithms with more speed, better performance, less power consumption, less compute cost, and better overall efficiency. Additionally, they have software stacks available for customers — so if you don’t know how to code the chip, you can go to them with a dataset and they will train the model and make it compatible with the chip. They do all the work for you so you can just start using it immediately.
His Journey 🪜
I know that’s a lot to wrap your head around, and Travis felt the same when he was in the undergrad computer science program at University of Waterloo. He actually wasn’t aware of this in the first place, he was still trying to figure out what he wanted to specifically pursue.
Cryptography? Wireless sensor networks?
And then came his mentor and supervisor, Chris Eliasmath (who’s currently the CEO of Applied Brain Research). Travis remembers Chris’s pitch for doing computational neuroscience research, when Chris told him:“Well, brains are kind of like wireless sensor networks. It’s a bunch of neurons communicating with each other.” That really caught his attention, and he decided to explore more into it through his master’s and PHD. His mentorship and experiences working in Chris’s group ultimately led them to start building brain-chips and time series algorithms. There’s actually an umbrella term for this: Neuromorphic Computing.
Neuromorphic Computing 💽
Neuromorphic computing allows neuromorphic hardware (brain-chips) to operate much more like the brain than conventional hardware. Pretty self-explanatory, right? In other words,
You have a bunch of simple processors that all operate in parallel. And this is, of course, very similar to how the brain works, where you have a bunch of neurons that do very simple operations, and all run in parallel, and they get their power from running together, rather than performing many complex operations super quickly, one after the other.
His team realized the capabilities of neuromorphic computing and saw limitations of it in the market, which is why they shifted to the commercial world.
I think it’s a super exciting space.
If you really think about it, because of Moore’s Law, transitioning to neuromorphic computing is inevitable. Moore’s Law limits how fast a chip can be processed. How come? Well, the size of a transistor is now so small that there just isn’t much more we can do to make them smaller. Gradually moving from standardized sequential computing, like the basic CPU, to neuromorphic computing that runs just like how our brain operates is one of the promising ways to go about this issue.
It’s really the space in between the two of them that we’re going to see explode in popularity as we take a standard computer, and we just add more and more features from neuromorphic computers to it.
This way neuromorphic computing can be easily transferable to every industry out there. Usually, neuromorphic hardware would be built for very specific applications, to enable optimization of efficiency, power, and performance.
Gems of Insight 💎
His journey has been truly like a rollercoaster ride — completing his PHD to cofounding Applied Brain Research. Along the journey, he has developed many skills, and one of them is being very comfortable not understanding something. Letting yourself know that it’s okay to not make sense of everything at the first moment. It’s important to develop confidence and be optimistic that it is possible for me to understand things as well as constantly putting effort into asking questions.
I’m a programmer at heart. And so developing a process for debugging: test it, simplify it, and work backwards is crucial.
Pro tip: Learn how to code! Make projects and upload them on GitHub. Get that experience of building code, reviewing code, and putting it out there. It’s super valuable when you’re looking for internships and jobs! The best way to learn is by replicating projects that you found interesting to know the thought-process and reasoning behind it.
Travis highlights the importance of asking questions during the learning phase as well as the experimental phase. Embracing yourself to the struggle to answer the question and being confused is the best way to grow. Remember you will reach a point where it’s not on Google.
I had several times where I would Google a question and my own blog came out. That’s not helpful Google.
Managing his work, family and himself is not only difficult for Travis, but for everyone. One thing to keep in mind is to chase your passions no matter what and always make time for you to spend on things that you’re passionate about. Think of it as working for yourself and maintaining a sense of inner calm.
And I do a fair bit of that myself outside of my own work time here at ABR. I do make sure to, as much as possible, keep myself to a nine to five, and encourage everyone on my team to do the same and follow their own passions outside of work.
TL;DR 😅
- Travis DeWolf is the co-founder and COO of Applied Brain Research (ABR).
- Applied Brain Research uses advanced neuroscience research to solve real-world problems.
- Travis started ABR with his mentor and a group of friends, showing the importance of working with people you can trust and rely on.
- Travis started programming at a young age, and he emphasized the importance of learning to code, as coding can be used in many different fields.
- Always ask questions and do what you need to do to understand a topic as best as you can.
- He sticks to a schedule, which helps him balance family, work, and self care.
Rapid Fire 🔥
- If you weren’t working at ABR right now, what would have been your dream job? Climate tech, I’d love to apply machine learning to solve issues of climate change.
- Would you have wanted to start your own climate-tech company or work at a pre-existing one? And which one would it be? Yeah, I do enjoy the startup life depending on the company. They would have to let me keep my own hours basically. That’s of high value to me. So, someone else’s company where I can do that is fine. Startup, otherwise also very appealing.
- What would you say is your favorite hobby? Ultimate Frisbee
- What’s your favorite store? I tend to spend most of my time at Nofrills.
- What would you say is your dream destination? I love New Zealand. It’s like my favorite parts of Canada all condensed into a small island.
- What’s your all time favorite movie? Bourne Identity series. Primer, is also very good — a time travel movie.
- Cats or dogs? Dogs! I will have to add that I grew up with outside dogs on a farm.
- What’s the proudest moment in your life? Hard to say off the top of my head, but it’ll be centered around my daughter, who’s now 15 months old.
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