Dogyssey : Chapter 1
Israeli chutzpah, Indian agency, Berkeley sparks, Names, Vision
Digital homing pigeon released from Zuzulu Montenegro.
Chutzpah
(noun) supreme self-confidence : also nerve, gall, audacity, effrontery
from the Yiddish khutspe, from Late Hebrew ḥuṣpāh
Ten weeks in the Holy Land / Startup Nation (02022023 - 22042023)
Israel was a fitting first chapter in the dogyssey, filled with a growing sense of ground, assuredness, and clarity, with a sprinkle of za'atar and chutzpah. The tone was set within the first week with a friendly meeting with Assaf and Zvi, CTO and data scientist of SpotItEarly. Strolling in Tel Aviv’s vibrant Sarona Market, I listened to the remarkable progress in the early detection of cancer made by the intrepid crew of entrepreneurs, scientists, and labradors. Interim results from their large clinical trial found a 93% specificity and sensitivity in the detection of the four most common types of early and late stage cancers. A lab of labradors providing highly accurate, early stage, multi-purpose, inexpensive, and convenient disease screening no longer remains a pipe-dream, indeed, the future of furry dognostics is already here.
Emboldened by such happenings apaw, I set forth on my research sprint at the vibrant Tech4Animals (T4A) lab in the charming city of Haifa. Led by the laser-sharp Anna Zamansky, T4A has been developing rigorous and sophisticated machine vision models that can predict the physical and mental states of animals and thus, was a natural base for laying the foundations for deciphering the canine mind.
My primary order of business was a rigorous assessment of the canine EEG space to craft a foundational text to launch near-future research. Surprisingly, measuring the neural electrobiome of dogs has an ‘ancient’ history, with Adolf Beck recording from the canine brain 130 years ago. I read (lightly) over a 100 papers that deployed electrodes with dogs (and wolves!) and did deep dives into 22 papers that measured the EEG of domestic dogs without anaesthesia or piercing the skin. Close dissection of these studies, all within the past decade, revealed two key insights -
we can use relatively accessible and portable neuroimaging devices to make meaningful inferences on canine cognition
there is still a bunch of low-hanging fruit to chomp on in terms of improving hardware, data, and algorithms
Simultaneously, I fleshed out my technical and scientific know-how on acquiring, processing, and analysing EEG data — in general, enabled by an OpenBCI Ganglion and Muse 2, and for canines specifically, by cooking up pipelines and analysis frameworks for open-source and partner-shared data.1
The intangibles of Israel held as much gravity, if not more, than the concretes above. The leap of faith inherent in the independent pursuit of a lifetime project off-the-plodded path, the cracking of foreign cultural codes, the meeting with brilliant and kind people, the creation and refinement of goals, habits, and iterative feedback loops, and the two glorious sunny weeks in Tel Aviv hanging out with the amazingly life-filled Ozzy, these and more were all valuable gifts and blessings from the Holy land.
Three details that simply ask to be mentioned
Having committed to participating in Israel’s national neurotech hackathon, I found out the day before that my collaborator and her devoted service dog would not be making the event. Left canine-less, I instead joined forces with students from the BGU to work on an EEG hyperscanning neurofeedback game. Despite a certain team member’s mournful yearning for woofs, we ended up “winning”.
Wonderful people I met included Yossi Yovel of the BatLab and listening to plant screams fame, amazing people from Effective Altruism Israel, and a whole troop of eccentric folks at Purim, the Jewish carnival, in Jerusalem.
I had a world-changing experience eating the best falafel ever at Frishman, TLV.
Agency
“At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. ”
Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
Eight months post graduation steeping in India (01062022 - 31012023)
The lurching lull of quiet after an eventful spring graduation week followed by a home-bound landing to the sangeeth of my brother’s wedding allowed for the brewing of what was to come.
Emergent Ventures had been on my radar for a while and at the end of a month of mulling on what-is-life-after-college, I distilled my deepest resonances in a dream-vial of 1500 words. Two weeks later while reading Aurobindo’s incisive writings on Nietzsche’s lurid madness in the Pondicherry Ashram, a shot of lightning brought the vial’s contents to life.
A month later, on the cusp of India’s independence day, I was in the same Udaipur hotel with a hundred incredibly talented, ambitious, and driven people, at the Emergent Ventures India Unconference. Talking with people of my generation building highly impactful, hundred people plus companies, doing sophisticated and meaningful research and journalism, and generally refusing to accept societal constraints on the realm of possibilities, completely recalibrated my notions of capability and infused me with radical notion of agency.
The next months were preparation of body, mind, and spirit and a growing realization for the need of a leap of faith towards what became a research odyssey.
Sparks
“Berkeley, where cyberpunk meets psychedelic.”
“We already knew the solutions to many of the problems we now face. What we need to do is to simply relearn how to listen.” - what a time to be alive
2018 - 2022
I ended 2021 perched on the ledge of Doe library sensing a world bristling with a psychedelic cybernetic electricity. Cognitive Science at Cal is a smorgasbord of interdisciplinarity with an overriding resonance of encounter — of carbon meeting silicon, animal meeting symbol, history meshed with future — and being at the confluence of these streams led to an overwhelming sense of wanting to build bridges.
With the doors of perception slightly ajar, dogluk began to open their eyes, poodling around at the methods of entrepreneurship bootcamp, attempting lift-off with a catalyst grant, synthesising expansive models of cognition through an honors thesis, and landing a new beginning with an optimistic vision of the future.
Names
dognosis
(noun) the art or act of identifying a disease through partnership with a dog
(noun) living together in intimate association or close union between dog and man
(noun) esoteric knowledge of spiritual truth through encounters with Dog
dogluk : nominative determinism
sympoiesis technology : the bringing-forth of the true nature of things through the making-with or becoming-with other beings.
Vision
Conceived through a light moat
her gaze that june night was a moat-light that broke through.
Distilled to a concentrate of poiesis technology, dialogical living and aligned uplift
these limitations can be transcended, not just by simply leaving behind the soil of Being, but better, by rerouting our technological prowess towards synapsing connections that burst pass the bars of our Umwelt and seed an interconnectedness that is mycelial, harmonious, and aligned from its very conception.
On-going as a work-ever-in-progress at the collaborative consortium dognosis project.
Next update will be in a few months from now. If you have read this far, I appreciate you.
Doggedly yours,
ASK
More details in a publication-enroute tradsci article, as well as a practical primer on Labrador Journal (coming soon here).