Chris Kortge

FOUNDER
 

Chris studied cognitive science under an NSF Graduate Fellowship in David Rumelhart’s lab at UCSD and Stanford. His unfinished PhD was aimed at mitigating catastrophic forgetting in neural networks.

He designed a speed-optimized convolutional net for handwriting recognition (possibly the first one for a mobile device), and in 1992 co-launched a company named Lexicus to develop it. After working for its acquirer Motorola, Chris spent about 25 years doing solo research, mostly on real-time machine learning and related applications. In the late 1990s he invented the vector database search method now known as HNSW.