Person

I tend to be a very private person and prefer investing the vast majority of my time with people and relationships in the real world. I also tend to work on projects that have different levels of protections, intellectual property rights, and security requirements and as such am limited in what I can share publicly. So, my online presence may be sparse, uneven, or occasionally very rich. Mileage may vary. If you want to know who I really am as a person find me at a conference, invite me for coffee/tea, visit me in the glass studio, or ask me to come visit and give a talk about my work/research. I love meeting new people and learning about what excites you. Maybe we can find some overlaps of passion? 

My Personal Hobbies are Glassblowing, Metalwork, Boating, Off-roading (ATV/UHV), Camping, Games (board, card, video), Wine-making, Woodworking, Gardening, and Quadcopters.

G. Michael Youngblood, PhD, is Chief Science Officer at Filuta AI and Director of Filuta AI Labs, where he leads research through shipped product on a document-intelligence platform. For more than thirty years he has built intelligent systems and the partnerships that carry research into practice: as a Distinguished Principal Scientist at PARC, a tenured computer science professor at UNC Charlotte, and a U.S. Navy nuclear submariner. He has been PI or Co-PI on more than $36.6M in sponsored research, authored 115 publications, and holds nine U.S. patents across sixteen families. He studies how people and teams change as AI moves from tool to collaborator. He lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

G. Michael Youngblood, PhD, is an artificial intelligence researcher, engineer, and research leader who builds intelligent systems and the partnerships that carry research into practice. He is Chief Science Officer at Filuta AI and Director of Filuta AI Labs, a member of the company’s executive council. He leads research through shipped product on a document-intelligence platform that turns large, heterogeneous document collections into searchable knowledge. He also manages TWIST, a Czech national research program run jointly with Charles University in Prague. His career focus is interactive artificial intelligence, human-machine collaboration, and automated planning, delivered as systems used by real people. His current research asks how people and teams change as AI shifts from tool to collaborator.

Before Filuta, Dr. Youngblood spent twelve years at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, rising to Distinguished Principal Scientist. As Assistant Area Manager for Human-Machine Collaboration, he led a research area and carried financial accountability for a sponsored portfolio that peaked at $5.8M a year. He led the Fittle behavior-change platform from concept through eight pilot studies with more than 1,200 users to commercialization. He was Co-Principal Investigator on five DARPA programs and technical lead on four, including the Explainable AI program’s COGLE project, which explained autonomous drone decisions to the people responsible for them, and COMBAT, whose simulation he bridged into a U.S. Army program of record. He was Principal Investigator of a project that reprogrammed field-programmable gate arrays on cubesat satellites to survive single-event effects. His PARC-era inventions produced nine granted U.S. patents across sixteen patent families, with additional grants in Canada and Japan and filings in Europe and Australia.

Earlier, he was a tenured associate professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. There he directed the Game Intelligence Group, co-founded the Game Design & Development programs, and mentored eleven senior design and studio teams that shipped working systems, from Xbox games to an autonomous underwater vehicle, through public demonstration days. He founded a start-up, Geometric Analytics, after negotiating an unencumbered intellectual property release from the university. His doctoral graduates now work at OpenAI, Sandia National Laboratories, and Salesforce. Before that, he was chief scientist of the National Science Foundation-funded MavHome smart home project at UT Arlington. He has authored 115 publications (h-index 24) and has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on more than $36.6M of sponsored research. He chaired the IAAI, AIIDE, and FLAIRS conferences, received FLAIRS’s Douglas D. Dankel II Award for service, and was a member of the 2007 DARPA Computer Science Study Group (DARPA’s counterpart to the NSF CAREER award).

Dr. Youngblood came to engineering through work and military service: eight years in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine force, specializing in mechanical systems, nuclear chemistry, and radiological controls. He is a plank owner of USS BOISE (SSN-764), helped decommission USS CANOPUS (AS-34), and helped lead the improvement of USS EMORY S. LAND (AS-39) into one of the fleet’s best nuclear repair facilities. He earned his associate’s degree by correspondence while standing watch at sea, his bachelor’s summa cum laude as a veteran, his master’s in evening classes while working as a software engineer, and his PhD in computer science and engineering at UT Arlington in 2005. He is still known for getting the job done on time, on budget, and by design.

He lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on part of the original Harris Farm. He serves on the board of a 38-connection community water system in the Sacramento Mountains, volunteers as a projectionist at southern New Mexico’s only art-house cinema, and works as a furnace glass artist, trained in Murano, Italy, and San Jose, California. He is a member of AAAI, the ACM, and the IEEE Computer Society, a Tau Beta Pi Fellow (2002–03), and a member of Sigma Xi.

My name is Michael or in more formal settings Dr. Youngblood (preferred) or Professor Youngblood. Students also tend to just call me Dr. Y, which is perfectly acceptable to me.

How do you pronounce "G. Michael Youngblood?" Well, the "G" is silent. 😀 and the rest is "MY"-kull, where kull - rhymes with dull.  y UH ng b l UH d. My first name is Gregory, that is not a secret, my parents always called me by my middle name instead, and I have never changed that. There are a few of us oddball middle name folks around. 

My pronouns are he-him. I also like the royal we. 

2005 Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Intelligent Systems

• • Advisors: Lawrence B. Holder and Diane J. Cook, GPA: 4.00/4.00

  • Dissertation: Automating Inhabitant Interactions in Home and Workplace Environments through Data-Driven Generation of Hierarchical Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes

  • Sigma Xi

2002 M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Intelligent Systems

• • Advisor: Lawrence B. Holder, GPA: 4.00/4.00

  • Thesis: Agent-based Simulated Cognitive Intelligence in Real-time Entertainment-based Artificial Environments

1999 Honors B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Robotics

• • Thesis Advisor: Lawrence B. Holder, GPA 4.00/4.00 Summa Cum Laude

  • Thesis: Autonomous Mobile Robot Exploration and Mapping of Place-Centric Occupancy Grids 

  • Tau Beta Pi, Texas Eta

  • Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Texas Gamma

  • Omicron Delta Kappa, Sincerus Orbis Circle

  • Golden Key Honor Society

1995 A.S. in Nuclear Engineering Technologies, Thomas Edison State College, Radiation Protection

1989-1994 U.S. Navy Nuclear Power Engineering Training:

• • 1994 Radiological Materials Shipper, Norfolk, VA

  • 1993 Radiological Controls Maintenance, IMANPY, Charleston, SC

  • 1990 D1G Engineering Laboratory Technician, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratories (DOE), Ballston Spa, NY 

  • 1990 D1G Prototype Mechanical Operator, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratories (DOE), Ballston Spa, NY 

  • 1989 Naval Nuclear Power School, Orlando, FL

  • 1989 Nuclear Field “A” School (Mechanical), Orlando, FL

1988 Bishop High School

• • Graduated 7th of 88

  • National Honor Society

  • Mu Alpha Theta 

I am a Myers-Briggs type  ENTP-A. While some folk's personality preferences are clearly indicative of a certain type, I tend to be more neutral and lean towards this type. I believe that this helps me understand other preference sets, and has allowed me to listen, internalize, and empathize more with others. I have also participated in FIRO-B evaluation, which revealed an expressed/wanted behavior preference set typical in strong team builders and leaders. 

Psychometric analysis is an interesting area, but not necessary an exact science. I am always interested in talking with others that have participated in formal personal psychometric evaluations with the caveat that you have to know yourself and your preferences/scores to discuss me and mine.

LinkedIn - My digital CV

Instagram - Social picture sharing.

Twitter - Public ramblings with infrequent posts.

YouTube - Research videos and other recordings.

Pinterest - A sense of my style or atleast the style of the ideas I collect.

500px - High quality pictures I have taken that I am sharing with everyone including use in other peoples projects, media, and other art.

Facebook - The ethically-challenged social network. I am no longer an active member. Catch me on Instagram instead. I know that they are both owned by different type-face (i.e., 2-faced) FACEBOOK, INC.

I am a level 7 Google Local Guide as well as an Open Street Map contributor working to improve the data in the world around us.