Paul Golding: Chief Scientist

Architect of “Cognitive Transformation”…

My (Short) Story

Originally from the UK, I am an IEE prize winner with over 30 patents in a wide array of advanced technologies including AI, Bias in AI, Signal Processing, Computer Vision, Computational Aesthetics and blockchain.

In 2011, I moved to Silicon Valley after being awarded a self-sponsored “Genius Visa” from the US government.

I designed my first commercial product (fibre-optic multiplexor) whilst still an undergrad, aged 19, and was subsequently awarded the Von Rheinhold Nostrand prize.

At age 22, I won the Motorola global patent of the year for a chip design that enabled radical shrinkage of cellular base stations.

I am one of the inventors of the mobile app and wrote several leading text books in the field. I also built probably the world’s first text messaging app (for Lucent Technologies).

In 2016 I met Sergey Brin to discuss a potential role running R&D for Google Glass (my PhD research in the 90s was in augmented reality) but the position was withdrawn with the demise of Glass.

I pioneered the use of machine learning co-processor techniques in the 90s whilst designing one of the first ML chips for GSM mobile phones, for which I have several key patents.

I helped some of the world’s best brands with technology transformation, including O2 in the UK where I also led the creation of their start-up incubator program.

I held Chief Scientist, Chief Architect and CTO roles at a number of leading orgs across multiple continents.

I gave multiple keynotes at various prestigious corporate and public events, mostly as a “futurist”.

Outside of work, I helped my wife to homeschool three kids following a “renaissance” style eclectic education program that blended classical education with modern updates. For example, I am a proponent of teaching computational-based maths to kids in order to explore foundational ideas versus rote-learning of identities and so on. Of course, a side-effect is learning computation and probabilistic thinking. We also studied Arisotle’s Poetics, but as applied to modern cinema. Feel free to contact me if you want to know more.

I am a keen student of philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics and aesthetics. I have developed several theories of “attention” for the purposes of building “augmented creativity” AI algorithms and recently (2019) filed patents for novel chatbot algorithms using attention. My interest in linguistics began as a quest to make my digital note-taking more than just a digitized version of journaling, but rather a source of conceptual knowledge. This work is ongoing.

For a more in-depth bio and reader on my background, please my fuller “Deep Mind” bio.

Key Credentials

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IEE Prize

Winner of the IEE prize for outstanding achievement in Electronic Engineering (UK).

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30 patents in advanced technologies (1992-2019)

Including in AI, blockchain, computer vision, signal processing for cellular, computational aesthetics, attention-based bots, digital art and more.

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One of the Earliest Patents in Applied Neural Networks (Comms)

In 1995, Motorola filed for a patent for my invention: “Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network Adaptive Equaliser” which was one of the earliest NN patents in the field of communciations.

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Invited Speaker at Many Leading Orgs

I have presented “futurist” or technology insights talks to the likes of McLaren Racing, O2 UK, Naspers, Ericsson, AT&T, Vodafone, GSMA, 3 UK and many more.

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Von Rheinhold Nostrand (Publisher) Prize

Winner for achievement of designing a commercially adopted product (X.21 fiber-optic MUX) as an undergrad.

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Motorola Patent of the Year (Youngest ever recipient)

For designing a chipset radio that revolutionized the compactness of cellular basestations (for microcells). Multiple patents.

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World-beating financial OCR algorithm

For a fintech company in SF, I wrote Computer Visions software to read financial docs at any angle and with any amount of background noise, exceeding the capabilities of Google Cloud Vision and the leading finance OCR vendor (Lead Tools).

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Founder of Europe's First Mobile Apps Co.

I founded Magic E Company in 1996. We created many industry firsts:

First SMS gateway web API
First Microsoft Exchange wireless connector with full OTA capabilities.
First location-based service (MetroWalker HK and NTT DoCoMo Japan)

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Author of First Major Handbook for Mobile Apps

Published by Wiley Academic Press in 2004 – one of the first text books explaining mobile apps and related cellular technologies.

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Expert Member of Java Mobile Apps JSR

I was one of the few individual expert members of the Java Community Process team that developed the original mobile apps framework called MIDP.

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Inventor of connFu scripting language

connFu was a pioneering platform and programming language (Ruby DSL) for building telephony services atop of any carrier network

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Designer of the World's First GSM baseband chipset

I was lead designer for the Enhanced Filter Co-Processor (EFCOP) that enabled the world’s first DSP chip for GSM basestations.

See Portfolio for list of recent or notable projects.

Featured Podcasts

For a more peek into my career, life and activities, the following recent podcasts might prove useful (I hope).

Lead a Meaningful life, Optimize Learning & What Blockchain Has to Do With It

Not quite what is sounds. This began as a conversation between myself and Cody McLain whom I had met when he bought one of the Klio digital art devices I helped to design. Cody is an amazingly energetic, accomplished and thoughtful individual for his age and we got into some “30-min” Skype calls of the kind that go on for hours. During such chats we got into blockchain (one of my recent activities) and how I’d managed to work in some many different domains within tech, plus my interest in education and philosophy. So as part of his podcast interview series, I was honored to be interviewed so that we could share our conversations with a wider audience. The podcast goes into a lot of what motivates me as a technologist and father.

Featured Publications

I have written numerous books, essays, guest chapters and papers. Here are just a few notable examples.

From Writing books to Writing Repos: Elasticsearch

I stopped writing technical books after the vastness of self-teaching materials on the web became apparent. I doubt that I have much more to add to the corpus, although I recently re-wrote the Guide to Elasticsearch using Python examples instead of RESTful ones and published it as a Github repo. Please feel free to use, abuse and extend. Pull requests welcome (as I only covered about 60% of the API).

Next Generation Wireless Applications

My earlier books (“Next Generation Wireless Applications” editions 1 and 2) were written to fill a gap at the time, plus I used to teach mobile apps techniques and technologies so often that I needed a kind of “manual” to hand out. It was just about possible to navigate the entire scope of mobile apps within a single 600-page book back then. Note that the used of the term “next generation” was before anyone even knew there was such a concept as wireless applications, but I had already built many apps by then (see “my work”) and had previously done a lot of academic research into mobile comms methods where the term “next generation” was already in vogue (for what we eventually called “wireless data” versus voice).

Thumb Culture

I also wrote the final chapter about the future of mobile in the “Thumb Culture” compendium, in which I predicted the rise of mixed-reality devices (fairly easy to predict) and documented a Google-glass-esque use case. (As a side note, I ended up being interviewed by Sergey Brin to run a next-gen Google Glass research, but they canned the project.)

Connected Services

During an amazing few years trying to reinvent the carrier industry via a well-intentioned investment from O2 UK and Telefonica (see my work) I found myself having to explain the concept of platform business models and modern Web economics, like the API economy. The then-CEO of O2 (now at Verizon) had coined a term Connected Services about the future of carriers, but no one seemed to know what it really meant. Rather cheekily, I wrote a book to describe the application of modern web/platform techniques to carriers and called it “Connected Services” in an attempt to offer a comprehensive and meaningful definition.