This site is under construction. In the meantime, please check out the summaries of some of my personal projects on their page, and feel free to contact me if you're interested!
I'm Alexander Getka, though I usually just go by Alex. I'm a software engineer with a Bachelor's degree in bioengineering, now working in medical image analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania. I've long held strong interest in almost all forms of engineering and natural sciences, so I'm truly glad to be working in a space that is technological and scientific. When I'm not working, I love all kinds of games, cooking, keeping up with new technologies, and binge-watching. I'm very close with my brother, Jason.
My interests mostly involve using technology to make life better -- I'm not too picky on how! As I mentioned, I'm interested in a great many fields, so I'd like to clarify a little bit about what excites me most. To start, making life better includes two goals: reducing pain and suffering, and enhancing our lives by giving us the power to more easily self-actualize.
The former goal drives my interest in medicine, and especially in developing novel methods, materials, diagnostics and therapies. As our understanding of biology develops, we can develop technology that makes the process of curing disease and restoring function more effective, more predictable, easier, and less expensive. Easing the process of researching and developing these new technologies accelerates us toward a better future where nobody is held back by their body.
The latter goal is more ambiguous. Empowerment and enhancement might mean enabling us to express ourselves in a new way, or giving us more power and control over our environment. Crucially, this must come in a form where access to this is equitable and just, so that our lives are improved, and not worsened, by the existence of this technology. Consider strong artificial intelligence and robotics -- the existence of these could result in a world where nobody needs to perform backbreaking manual labor to survive, or they could result in a world where the poor or uneducated have even less recourse than today to make an honest living. But improving our material capabilities and productivity is not the only way to improve life. There is value in using technology to provide for our human desires, like for entertainment, or for self-expression and exploration. That might mean creating technology that improves or eases the process of making art, which helps people develop their skills and self-enrich, or developing a novel programming paradigm/language that allows us to think about problems in a different manner. Personally, I think these "human problems" present great (and challenging) opportunities.
At my core, I want to be a part of tackling these challenges. What form that takes exactly is largely immaterial to me. With that said, my preference is that my work is not merely incremental, but accelerates progress and helps me learn as much as possible.
Bio/medical engineering creates technological solutions to reduce suffering and improve quality of life, while advancing our knowledge of biological systems. To quote a friend of mine: "it's at the intersection of the intellectual imperative of engineering and the moral imperative of medicine". Being able to contribute to this space is a joy and an honor. Some topics in this space I find especially cool, outside of my work:
neural interfaces, smart biomaterials, phototherapeutics
I think that technology capable of interfacing with our own nervous system will prove to be incredibly valuable for a multitude of reasons. The first obvious application is to aid those with injuries or nerve damage to restore bodily function. The second is to allow us to interact with devices "with our mind" -- if interfaces driven by (for example) EEG could be perfected, perhaps we could capture a much richer set of variables about how a user intends to control a device, or provide much richer feedback. The third is a bit more far-reaching: to help us further understand our own brains and how experience and meaning emerge from a neural basis.
Smart biomaterials are substances which are engineered to have useful and interesting properties. Our bodies, themselves, are made of biomaterial. Engineered biomaterials promise to have properties which make them ideal for a given purpose, such as providing the strength needed to withstand the mechanical forces experienced in daily life, facilitating various bioprocesses including regeneration, intelligently targeting the delivery of pharmaceutical agents, and selectively cultivating or protecting against microbes.
Bioengineering may also be considered to cover engineering that is inspired by biological systems, or "bioinspired". This could be applied to using biomaterials for non-medical purposes, like "gecko gloves" using the same principle that geckos use to stick to walls, or could be any engineering solution that takes some design from nature.
Cognitive computing is a very unique example of bioinspiration, trying to replicate the way humans process information. It's a discipline of artificial intelligence that deals with intelligent reasoning capabilities, vision, interpretation, planning, and so on. The real draw of this is that it proposes something that we as humans would actually relate to as a multi-faceted intelligence, rather than purely inferential ability in a single domain as with traditional ML. I think technologies based on this will be increasingly important in the years to come, facilitating better human interaction with increasingly advanced technology in just about every domain.
As stated above, I also love games and virtual worlds. My fascination with them is what first got me interested in computer science, and I taught myself programming by first working in various game engines. A huge personal interest of mine is in examining (and maybe, someday, actually creating) rich, meaningful interactive experiences from the basis of mathematical models and software systems -- in other words, creating theory that pertains to games, virtual worlds and other interactive media and using it to spark innovation combining the artistic and technological aspects of the medium. If you have time to spare, I highly recommend watching the Game Developers Conference recordings available on YouTube, which delve into some very interesting technologies and ideas in this space, often from a more practical perspective. I think cognitive computing in this area is vastly under-explored and ripe for discovery and invention. If you're interested in games that have really rich interactivity and that push other conceptual and technological boundaries, try Space Station 13 (probably my all-time favorite), Dwarf Fortress, AI Dungeon, and BoneLab. Moreover, check out my personal project listing for some ideas I've worked on in my free time.