Moving back out west

I have worked as a Machine Vision engineer for over thirty years. Grandma Sarah actually found an ad for a technical writing/industrial training position with a robot/vision company in Corvallis named Intelledex back in 1983 shortly after I returned from a three month stint at University of Guadalajara to learn Spanish. The industry was very young at the time, but both the hardware and software to do useful work with cameras hooked up to computers was starting to make economic sense to solve a few classes of problems in the semiconductor, defense and electronics industries.

From then until now, there were a good number of people who focused on writing algorithms to do useful things with images. There seemed to be fewer people who dedicated themselves to cobbling those algorithms together with statistical, database and robot and equipment control algorithms to measure stuff, guide robots and perform solve “on the factory floor” problems. From the very beginning, I was one of those guys. It seemed then (and it seems like it has not changed much over the years) that most of the capable vision engineers wanted to write individual, low level algorithms while only a few of us were dedicated specifically to algorithms. The funny deal is that after ten years or so of application development it dawned on me that low level algorithm development was easier and more powerful when it was informed by knowledge of a broad application domain.

To make a long story shorter, after about fifteen years in the industry, I started to follow a career path solely devoted to solving especially difficult machine vision problems (inspecting chip capacitors for defects at 35 parts per second, finding retinal features in very noisy OCT images at high rates of speed, measuring 3d surface defects in U235 pellets as the bounced and rotated down counter rotating roles, performing pupil/gaze angle tracking at 400 frames per second, etc.). So the last fifteen years or so, I have gone from position to position to find hard problems, solve them and move on to the next thing. It is work I love.

I said all that to say that I have just about finished the work I came to do in Texas (performing video analytics to determine, in real time, whether someone in a hospital is about to fall out of bed so a care giver can be signaled to go to the aid of the patient). I have been offered a position out west to work on 3d imaging problems, not to write low level algorithms although there will be some of that, but to use these 3d cameras to create solutions to families of industrial problems around the world. Lorena and I have decided I should accept the position.

The other upside to this new position is, hopefully, I will be able to stay there until I retire. There are so many opportunities to solve hard problems with the new and improving 3d cameras and scanning systems, that I will likely have gainful employment as long as I am able to do the work. In addition, we will be closer to Kelly, Christian and Grandpa Milo and should be able to see them more often. There will be more about our move (when/where) as soon as I find out where we will move (it is a work from home job).