Brit Cruise

I’m thrilled to announce that my company Xperiential has partnered with Scratch, the world’s largest creative coding platform for young people, with over 120M registered users. It was a pipe dream years ago to partner with Scratch (who really understands peer to peer learning) and finally came true.

We’ve updated the Xperiential platform to integrate seamlessly with Scratch, enabling users to submit projects directly through Scratch alongside our existing video submissions. This technical integration connects us to Scratch’s massive global community.

This partnership represents a powerful strategy to scale Xperiential’s impact with one of the most trusted names in education technology, we’re positioned as a core creative learning partner to their entire creator community—opening up exciting possibilities for future Xperiential programs using Scratch tools.

More soon!

I had a ball making these two new econonmics videos. The first is on Prediction Markets…

The next is a story of money & debt. I’ve been pondering this for years and finally packaged it up into a story I’m proud of…

Thrilled to go back to one of my first passions, the stock market. In this series I’m going to dive into several key ideas in economics. This first video is focused on the magic of the price mechanism (The Computer that Runs the World).

I spent a year untangling the mess of RL research (which I struggled with for a long time) in this video. It covers the development of Value, Q, Policy functions & TD Learning. It’s the 7th video in my AI Series: THE PATTERN MACHINE which I’ve been working on since 2019.

Next Up I’ll be diving into ….. Economics!

I had a great time visiting Google in NYC. I gave a talk on my history in online education and what I’ve learned along the way so far.

I spent 2 years researching the work of Geoff Hinton, Yann LeCun, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy and others to create this video. It focuses on the core line of research that led @OpenAI to develop ChatGPT, starting with the work of the late Jeffery Elman in 1986. It’s the last video in this series on AI: The Pattern Machine.

Over the past few months my partners at X in a Box (Tony DeRose and Elyse Klaidman) and our team launched a brand new educational product/program: Story Xperiential in partnership with Pixar Animation Studios. In simple terms, our idea allows anyone to try their hand at working in different industries by building a prototype that industry would recognize – a kind of virtual apprenticeship open to all. With Pixar we used the storyreel (animated storyboard) as the prototype the students work on while Pixar employees assist as mentors. This program allows any student to mimic working in the real-world at top companies: it’s collaborative with weekly deadlines, ongoing peer feedback and culminates with a final online exhibition. I see it as a great prerequisite for pretty much everything students might do after.

Here is a 2 min overview of the program with actual product shots from the last 2 months:

The results of this program exceeded even my own rose coloured projections when we set out to build it. It has been an exhausting yet exhilarating learning experience. There is nothing quite like inventing a new experience from scratch and watching people walk through the door for the first time. We went live Oct 4th 2021 and our first Pilot wraps today with our first ever public exhibition of student work. The results of this program exceeded even my own rose coloured projections when we set out to build it. Over 90% of registered students completed the program with a final prototype (this involved 40 hours of work across 8 weeks with multiple weekly submissions). This kind of retention is unheard of in our industry. But the inevitable question arises: would it scale… ?

In March 2020, I launched a new company (X in a Box – http://www.xiab.org) with my colleagues Tony DeRose and Elyse Klaidman. Our idea was to take what we’ve accomplished with Pixar & Imagineering in a Box and expand on it in various ways. Here is a teaser of what we do:

We’ve been unexpectedly inundated with opportunities because of the dramatic shift to online learning as a result of the pandemic. Continue reading →

I’m thrilled to finally post part 3 in my Deep Learning series, it covers the first 80 years of neural network research and was one of the more difficult scripts & visualizations I’ve ever worked on. It pulls together many years of thinking about this subject:

Today I’m happy to announce we are finally launching Imagineering in a Box on Khan Academy from my team behind Pixar in a Box + some new partners at Walt Disney Imagineering. Here is a five min overview of the project:

A Brief History

When I was 12, I was so curious to find out how one could become an Imagineer. I wanted to learn about all the cool work going on behind the scenes of a theme park.

In the mid 90’s Continue reading →

Been hard at work at a seven part series on AI. I’ll most more details soon. For now:

This year I produced two videos with my friends at IEEE (Information Theory Society) which cover two highly influential academic papers from the 20th Century. What’s really exciting about these videos is we had the original authors of the papers review the script during development (Abraham Lempel and Robert Gallager). On average we spent about 4 months writing & iterating on each script until we had something that is clear and correct.

Here they are:

Lempel-Ziv compression – One of the most influential compression algorithms of the 20th Century:

LDPC codes – One of the most versatile and widely applicable error correction codes which was about 40 years ahead of its time:

In 2019 I will continue this project with IEEE.

I spent a long time thinking about a way to explain the what/why/how’s of Bitcoin to general audiences (my Mom) in a way that doesn’t frustrate Engineers (no hand waving). I feel that all existing Bitcoin videos contain jargon that scares away the typical viewer. In this video I made a point to avoid using a single word that might confuse people. I don’t know if I succeeded but I tried my very very best…

Please share this video with anyone who still doesn’t “get it” – as it might fill in some gaps.

This year marked the beginning of a long term collaboration with IEEE Information Theory Society. The goal of our ‘Information Age’ series is to produce short videos which bring to life the most impactful ideas from Information Theory and show how they play a role in our lives today. The first two pilot videos we produced in 2017 were on Network Coding and Space-Time codes. In 2018 we’ll be exploring source coding, channel coding, quantum information theory and security. Below are the 2017 pilot videos. I’ve enjoyed working with Matthieu Bloch, Michelle Effros, Christina Fragouli & Suhas Diggavi on this project.

Network Coding:

Space-Time codes (multi-input multi-output networks):

I spent many years pondering (making sense of) this question. I ended up building a entire Computer Science series just to get to it. This video explores complexity theory and the (P vs. NP question) and is the conclusion to the CS series. I hope it helps others get the the key realizations faster than i…