About Aquarius
Prescott Mackie (Founder)
With a background in engineering, extensive work experience as a (grad student) scientist, and an open mind, I set out to Boulder, CO in 2012 to study the human brain.
As a PhD candidate in Randy O'Reilly's lab at the University of Colorado, I focused mostly on understanding human decision-making and emotion and the regions of the brain involved. However, I took less of a scientific approach, and maintained an engineering mindset.
With Randy's impressive software (Emergent) that allowed a user to build neural networks from scratch, I started tinkering with small, simple systems of networks, building and adding more and more modules as the months went by.
As I began piecing together modules, I created my first virtual agent as a simple virtual "rat" that could approach different food and water sources. After completing my MA, I dropped out of the PhD program to continue to build on my own. A couple years later, I had created a simple monkey-like agent that could learn to crack a rock over a coconut.
Right now, I'm obsessed, and I'm continuing to build on to this ever growing system. I fully believe that true, human-level AI will come from developing a control system that closely follows the functional anatomy of the actual human brain. And that is what I've set out to do!
University of Colorado, Boulder
MA, Cognitive Psychology 2015
University of Iowa, Iowa City
MS, Biomedical Engineering 2011
BS, Biomedical Engineering 2009