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AI, Machine Learning & Autonomy

Writing on artificial general intelligence, AI coding tools, and autonomy for aircraft, plus notebook walkthroughs that build neural networks and regression from scratch.

  • Rebuilding My Portfolio with Cursor and Claude: From Squarespace to React
    Article

    Rebuilding My Portfolio with Cursor and Claude: From Squarespace to React

    Rebuilding ronpicard.com in Cursor with multiple models enabled (Premium, Composer 2 Fast, GPT-5.3 Codex, GPT-5.4, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6) and auto-selected by t…

  • The Quest for Artificial General Intelligence: Why the Answer May Lie in the Human Brain
    Article

    The Quest for Artificial General Intelligence: Why the Answer May Lie in the Human Brain

    A 2026-oriented tour from symbolic AI and deep learning to agentic assistants, then a brain-vs.-silicon comparison (software, hardware, neuroscience, conscious…

  • Build an AI Chess Engine As Fast As Possible using ChatGPT
    Article

    Build an AI Chess Engine As Fast As Possible using ChatGPT

    The Problem For a while now I have wondered how much faster it would be to build a C++ application with ChatGPT than without. So I set a goal to program a C++…

  • Navigating the Skies: AI and Autonomous Robotics
    Article

    Navigating the Skies: AI and Autonomous Robotics

    FuturePulse podcast episode featuring Ron Picard, Director of Autonomy Engineering and former USAF civil servant, on AI and autonomous robotics.

  • DoD artificial intelligence agents successfully pilot a fighter jet
    Article

    DoD artificial intelligence agents successfully pilot a fighter jet

    AFRL’s Autonomous Air Combat Operations, or AACO, and DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution, or ACE, AI-driven autonomy agents piloted the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot Sch…

  • The AAAx Vision to Accelerate Autonomy Test & Evaluation using the X-62A VISTA
    Article

    The AAAx Vision to Accelerate Autonomy Test & Evaluation using the X-62A VISTA

    The Autonomous Attritable Aircraft Experiment (AAAx) is an experimentation campaign that seeks to (1) Determine the competitive advantage of autonomous attrita…

  • Improvements to Feed-Forward Neural Networks Used to Classify Forest Type Covers Based on Cartographic Features
    Article

    Improvements to Feed-Forward Neural Networks Used to Classify Forest Type Covers Based on Cartographic Features

    As computational power increases, deep neural networks provide an empirically effective way to classify large data sets based on a small labeled subset. Forest…

  • Action Schema Neural Networks: Generalized Policies for Stochastic Planning Problems in the Wargaming Domain
    Article

    Action Schema Neural Networks: Generalized Policies for Stochastic Planning Problems in the Wargaming Domain

    Stochastic shortest-path problems have been of interest to the automated planning community for many years. Traditionally, policy solutions to these problems h…

  • Convolutional Neural Networks
    Article

    Convolutional Neural Networks

    In this notebook, we will walk through the design, training, and testing of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These neural networks will be used for image…

  • Neural Networks With Minibatch Stochastic Gradient Descent and Adaptive Moments (ADAM)
    Article

    Neural Networks With Minibatch Stochastic Gradient Descent and Adaptive Moments (ADAM)

    In this notebook, we will walk through the design, training, and testing of neural networks with multiple hidden layers using minibatch stochastic gradient des…

  • Neural Networks with Minibatch Stochastic Gradient Descent and Momentum
    Article

    Neural Networks with Minibatch Stochastic Gradient Descent and Momentum

    In this notebook, we will walk through the design, training, and testing of neural networks with multiple hidden layers using minibatch stochastic gradient des…

  • Neural Networks With Single Neuron Implementation
    Article

    Neural Networks With Single Neuron Implementation

    In this notebook, we will walk through the design, training, and testing of a neural network with one neuron. This neural network will be used for logistic reg…

  • Neural Networks of L-Layers, N-Neurons with Dropout and L2 Regularization
    Article

    Neural Networks of L-Layers, N-Neurons with Dropout and L2 Regularization

    In this notebook, we will walk through the design, training, and testing of neural networks with multiple hidden layers. We will train networks utilizing L2 re…

  • 3D Linear Regression Using Gradient Descent Implementation
    Article

    3D Linear Regression Using Gradient Descent Implementation

    In this notebook, we will walk through how to perform linear regression using gradient descent. The goal for this example is to predict what the good market pr…

  • 2D Linear Regression Using Gradient Descent Implementation
    Article

    2D Linear Regression Using Gradient Descent Implementation

    In this notebook, we will walk through how to perform linear regression using gradient descent. The goal for this example is to predict what the profit for a n…

  • Linear Regression Using Gradient Descent
    Article

    Linear Regression Using Gradient Descent

    When it comes to machine learning a popular starting place tends to be linear regression using gradient descent. The reasoning is that it is a simple optimizat…