photo of Sam Freed

Dr Sam Freed

Post:Associate Research Fellow (Informatics)
Location:CHICHESTER 1 CI168
Email:S.Freed@sussex.ac.uk

Biography

Worked in software since age 15, in Israel, Ireland, the UK, Japan and Gulf Emirates.

All my life I ask one question: why does AI fail in the real world, at tasks all humans find easy? That question drove my PhD at Sussex, my research at the Centre for Cognitive Science, and ultimately my book "AI and Human Thought and Emotion" where I made the case that current AI is built on 19th-century mathematics and oversimplified neuroscience, and that real-world environments require a fundamentally different architecture.

Today at Mental Engines, this is implemented as SBI - Scenario-Based Intelligence, which is a novel edge-native AI technology that runs locally on devices, trains on small amounts of real operational data, and moves the learning process to the field. Tiny Data. No cloud. No retraining cycles.

This technology is deployed with three major partners across greenhouse robotics, managed farms, and precision agriculture.

Career highlights include:

  • Setting up the first Email connections between Israel's academic institutions and CSnet, the overseas relay of the ARPAnet.
  • Founding and leading the first Irish software development team working for a major multinational. The work involved porting Lotus 1-2-3 to various UNIX-based platforms.
  • Leading the "all projects not fitting elsewhere" team in CheckPoint, the leading firewall vendor. This included handling relations with IBM, HP and European governments, coordinating the engineering and business sides of the company, managing the performance test lab, and other projects.

Role

Associate research fellow @ Sussex

Visiting Lecturer @ Weizmann Institute of Science

Founder & CEO @ Mental Engines.

Community and Business

Founder & CEO of Mental Engines: Building Physical AI based on secure, data efficient Edge AI models

https://mentalengines.ai

Qualifications

BA in Philosophy & Comparative Religion - Hebrew University, Jerusalem

MA in Cognitive Science - Hebrew University, Jerusalem

PhD in Informatics, University of Sussex

Activities

  • Currently working on a book preliminatily titled "Silico Sapiens".
  • Wikipedia editor, substantially wrote the articles about:
  • Hubert Dreyfus's views on artificial intelligence
  • Autonomous Car
  • Motion Planning
  • Non-academic:
    • Real Estate projects in Ireland, Israel and central Europe
    • Gradening, especially getting Europen plants to grow in Jerusalem.