Ice Lakes Labs is a platform for sharing personal projects that I find interesting; it’s a vehicle for new collaborations; it keeps me out of trouble. Ice Lakes Labs doesn’t pay the bills, or anyone’s salaries.
Prior to my retirement earlier this year from A Really Big Technology Company, I oversaw, among a bunch of other things, a research lab - in the classic “industrial research lab” vein. I had the best job ever - for over fifteen years, my research lab colleagues and I identified veins of technological exploration the pursuit of which we felt our lab - and the company we worked for - would enjoy some differential advantage. Then we’d launch a project, and have fun in whatever field - materials science, optics, microfabrication techniques, silicon development, operating systems, programming language design, mathematical optimization, and - of course, the oldest new, new thing - “machine learning” - including the deep learning revolution and the rise of the LLM.
The research was fun, but the best part was the incredible colleagues I got to work with every day. I used to joke that I - head of the lab - was the local minimum - everyone who worked for me was smarter than me, and my bosses - silicon valley visionaries and business leaders - were too.
Someday, maybe I’ll write about all that. In any case, the lab is still more or less there - but I’m not.
Retirement has been a lot of fun so far - traveling, seeing friends, getting enough sleep, spending time with my wife. But, it seems that you can take the pointy-haired boss out of the research lab - but you can’t take the research lab out of him… the satisfaction of persistent endeavor and ingenuity rewarded by overcoming a challenge is hard to beat.
The good news is - there are little “research problems” that crop up in everyday life - especially when it comes to our built environment. I’ve always found some fulfilment personally maintaining and improving my own domain - even if it might be more economical to hire someone else to do it.
Combine the widespread availability of any number of small, low-power microcontrollers, the unbelievable productivity of AI-enabled programming, some free time (did I mention that I retired?) and a little ingenuity, and suddenly, some of the little annoyances around the house are… opportunities. (Yeah, sadly, I even use stuff like that on myself, not just on my old team…)
So… “Ice Lakes Labs” is a way to collect together these little projects, infused with the spirit of innovation and perseverance that I’ve grown to love.
-me