Patrick J Talbot

Patrick Talbot was born in 1948 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of five children, tasked for a few months with getting his siblings home at lunchtime, fed, and back to school in 45 minutes. He attended parochial schools for 9 years, and went to a big high school. After working for a few years as a bartender and a lawnmower salesman at Sears, he attended the Pennsylvania State University, graduating in three years with degrees in Applied Mathematics and Physics.

Patrick began his career as an Aerospace Engineer with TRW in 1972, doing anti-submarine warfare work under contract to the U.S. Navy in Washington D.C. He went back to school, again at Penn State, for a Masters Degree in Physics. He bridged this time with TRW and went back to work, this time in Redondo Beach, California doing mission design for space and missile systems. As a sign of the times, he was given six months to derive the equations used in an orbital dynamics simulation. The report, published in 1975, was laboriously typed by his future wife Sheila.

Patrick gravitated to Independent Research and Development (IR&D) projects and received funding for the first of these in 1977. The task was to simulate the back-scattered radar signature from earth-orbiting satellites with the goal of determining the size, shape, orientation in orbit, and mission of these active satellites. The project started with the idea of performing a Laplace Transform on Maxwell's Equations and expanded to include diffraction equations for spacecraft composed of simple shapes.

By 1980, he was working on Air Force command and control projects for the Space Defense Operations Center in Colorado Springs. This work awakened an interest in artificial intelligence for decision-making. He tackled the issues associated with underlying uncertainty, bolstered by the emerging research in evidential reasoning using the Dempster-Shafer Combination Rule. The significance of this new idea is that the range of possibilities associated with a hypothesis need not be specified at the onset - we can plead ignorance and work in an open world of unknowns rather than the closed world of classical and Bayesian statistics.

As his work with IR&D projects continued, interspersed with work on proposal and projects, his team of software engineers began building artificial intelligence software for decision-making under uncertainty. Domains expanded from space to intelligence, naval operations, army planning, and climate change. He and members of his team received six patents for work done between 2000 and 2008. During his last two years with TRW/Northrop Grumman, he worked on the National Team for Missile Defense, retiring in 2011.

During the last nine years, Mr. Talbot has written four books. These include a detailed description of his 40 years of work at TRW/Northrop Grumman, an auto-biographical book, a risk analysis on fracking, and a new book on Guess-and-Check algorithms. He has also written 90+ papers as entries in crowd-sourcing contests, and won a few cash prizes.