Advisory Committee Bios

Larry Walker

Larry spent over 40 years in the Computer Industry followed by 10 years helping to deliver Leadership Development programs based on the groundbreaking work of Dr. Robert Terry.  Based on Dr. Terry's classifications, I am an Empowerer, i.e. I provide support to others who have great ideas.  This has given me the privilege to work with change-makers in a wide array of activities, including Societal Change, Communication, Veterans Support, Distributed Cities Model, Resiliency, Computer Security, Productivity Improvement, Merging Cultures, Complex Adaptive Systems, Empathy and Compassion, Video Production, Language Mastery, Community Organizing, and Mothering.  Additionally, my current passion is Childhood Trauma as I have learned that this is a multi-generational epidemic -- and -- our State and Federal Governments are doing very little to address the issue. 

In 1984, I launched a $250 million Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiative within Sperry Univac. After two years, we had 100 projects running - in every division of the company worldwide. 350 AI programmers were engaged in the projects. We used AI hardware from Texas Instruments based on work done by MIT. AI software from a startup company spun out from Stanford. 50 customers committed. We also partnered with 43 universities worldwide to begin preparing our future AI workforce. As part of this partnership, we provided AI hardware and software for their use and experimentation. There is no question that Sperry Univac was leading the world in applying Artificial Intelligence. In 1987 we got taken over by Burroughs - hostile takeover -- and they stopped it all.

In 1987, I started PEAKSolutions to deliver solutions to the commercial marketplace. We delivered 40 significant solutions to a variety of clients and had revenue up to $3 million in 3 years. But the project crashed in 1992 when AI got a bad name nationally -- although we delivered excellent results.

In 1992, I named my second company Knowledge Management, Inc. “Organizing Knowledge for Use” became our company tagline. We developed a 'Knowledge Engine' after one year, based on the DNA of Knowledge -- All you need is 'content' + 'who, why, where, when, what, and how' would anyone ever want to see this content. The unit of content was the paragraph — defined as a 'unit of thought'. We aimed to structure knowledge for use and encouraged the integration of knowledge across domains (discreet fields being entered). We were making progress until the Internet appeared in 1994 and took up the nation's mind space. Even though we could demonstrate solutions they could not do anywhere else, they would not buy if we were not Internet-based. The company still exists but has been mostly inactive for the last dozen years. 'Organizing knowledge for use' was how we sold projects.

All our conversations with clients were done at their knowledge level, e.g. the head of strategic planning would describe what issues they had. The implementation would be done using their vocabulary. Items were stored in a knowledge base, not a database. If multiple applications were done for a client, the knowledge engine would integrate dynamically across all of them. This often led to connections that even their experts did not have in mind.

While Squarespace is not as rich as our Knowledge Engine, the Systemopedia can get part of this by using Categories and Tags. This can enable users to find related knowledge across sections as well as resources.