Bryant Cruse was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1950. His natural curiosity about science and nature were encouraged by his mother from his very early years. In grade school he developed an enduring love of mythology and science fiction.
1966 – 1973
When he was 16, Cruse decided he needed a “philosophy of life.” Rather than looking for one to adopt, he committed himself to a project develop his own. His guiding principles were a confidence in the scientific method and the idea as expressed by John Muir, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
He found St. John’s College in Annapolis with its unique Liberal Arts curriculum based on the 100 most influential works of western civilization ideal for his project. His approach to the curriculum was a bit contrarian since he approached the readings not as a scholar dedicated to discovering what the writers thought about the great ideas but rather to leverage their insights to discover what he thought about those ideas.
During those years he became fascinated with the question of “how we know what we know” and the relationship between knowledge and reality. He conceived an original theory of epistemology asserting that despite philosophers’ focus on truth, the most powerful ideas are theories, models of reality that are constantly being refined, refuted, replaced, and superseded but always providing some practical utility. We do not say of models that they are true or false, only better or worse at delivering the utility for which they were designed. This theory would eventually become the cornerstone for his later work in Artificial General Intelligence.
1973 – 1979
Naval Aviator
He graduated from St. Johns in 1973 with a BA Liberal Arts (the only degree offered.) Motivated by “an intense desire to stop just thinking about things and to get out in the world and actually do something.” He entered Naval Aviation Officer Candidate school in Pensacola September of the same year.
After earning his wings as a Naval Aviator, he was assigned to a strategic reconnaissance squadron based at Patuxent River flying modified C-130 (Hercules) aircraft on rotating deployments throughout the North Atlantic basin. He advanced to Aircraft and Mission Commander by the end of his three year tour.
1979 – 1991
Space Systems Engineer – John’s Hopkins
After 8 years of active duty, having done the aero part of aerospace, as he puts it, he was how ready to try the space part. He entered a graduate program in Space Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins and earned an MS degree. Shortly after matriculation he began his first job as a space system engineer at Westinghouse Space systems.
AI and Space Operations – Hubble Space Telescope
In 1984 Cruse joined Lockheed as the on-board Data Management System engineer on the Operations team of the soon to be launched Hubble Space Telescope at Goddard Space Flight Center. In that capacity he developed some of first operational mission scenarios leading to flight-software changes and revised mission timelines.
While working on Hubble, Cruse envisioned a new way to operate spacecraft by using Artificial Intelligence to analyze spacecraft engineering telemetry, transforming it into actionable information so operators could fly the spacecraft the way pilots do aircraft.
Lockheed AI Center
The Hubble program office supported his vision and funded his attendance at a 6-month residency in AI at the newly christened Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center in Palo Alto. The program, designed to be the equivalent to a master’s degree in AI, was mostly staffed by professors from nearby Stanford University.
While at the AI Center, he became the driving force behind a project to develop the world’s first expert system engine with the real-time performance to keep up with a spacecraft telemetry stream.
Talarian Corporation, Co-Founder and VP Operations
While NASA and Lockheed management both had nothing but praise for the new technology, bureaucratic inertia delayed actual deployment. Growing impatient, Cruse, secured venture funding and, together with his AI Center colleagues, founded Talarian Corporation. Talarian negotiated a license for the expert systems technology from Lockheed.
In 1991 Talarian transformed itself into one of the first middleware companies, finding a more lucrative market by commercializing the networking software that had been developed for the telemetry tool. Cruse left at that time to continue pursuing to continue his vision for automated space operations. Talarian was later acquired by Tibco Inc which in turn went public in 2000.
Naval Space Command
Cruse resigned his regular commission in the Navy in 1979 but continued to serve in the Naval Reserve until retiring with the rank of Commander in 1992. He left flight status in 1986 when he transferred to the Naval Reserve Naval Space Command where he supported a number of engineering and operational projects involving naval space assets. He served as Executive Officer of the unit in 1990.
1991 – 2002
Altair Aerospace Corporation, Founder and CEO
Still focused on applying AI to space operations, Cruse founded Altair in 1991. The company developed a fresh approach by which the engineer’s knowledge of the spacecraft could be described as a state model using a simple text format. No programming skills and no paradigm shift (as in knowledge to inference chains) was required. These files were then directly compiled to create a software object structure and for the first time ever, knowledge rather than data was achieved in machines.
The technology was applied to the ground control system for the commercial Conestoga launch vehicle. It was widely recognized as the most highly automated launch control system ever built. It performed spectacularly and was delivered for less than 10% of the cost of conventional systems.
After, Conestoga, the company flourished for several years but in the late 1990s after the financial failures of the Iridium and Globalstar satellite telephone ventures, commercial investment in space ventures dried up. Altair was left without a viable market and the company and its technology was sold to Aeroflex Inc., a public company, in 2000.
Valkeir Corporation – President
Cruse founded Valkeir in 2002 and continued working on advanced spacecraft applications. Valkeir delivered and operated the award winning Aqua Model-Based Advisor to Goddard Space Flight Center. It was the first fully automated remote, over the Internet, spacecraft telemetry monitoring and analysis system.
2002 – 2014
Foundational work in Artificial General Intelligence
During this period, Cruse gradually created a synthesis between his early theoretical work on the nature of knowledge and his practical experience making knowledge computable to automate spacecraft operations. In 2005 in teamed with brilliant computer scientist and linguist, Karsten Huneycutt, and began a research project aimed at achieving a computable model of commonsense reality.
Cruse hypothesized that knowledge has underlying properties, a hidden structure, which could be explicitly implemented as a software object structure without having to emulate the neural processing architecture of the human brain. Such a structure could support a compact world model that could be extended by reasoning about incoming information such as natural languages rather than being trained against datasets.
2014 – Present
New Sapience, Inc. Founder and CEO
The company is commercializing a platform that is considered the operating system for AGI applications. Their software entities, called sapiens, exhibit common sense, can explain their reasoning and have genuine comprehension of human language.
