John Santerre, PhD·teaching at UC Berkeley & SMU·Founder, CEO, CTO & CAIO in deep tech·photojournalist in a previous life
Every point behind this text is a concept I teach; every line, a connection I drew.
Work with me → or get occasional updates
scrocco — haiti · palestine · burma · venice →
Taking one of my courses? Your material lives here — slides, notebooks, and workbooks, kept current through the semester.
Everything the courses teach, connected into one navigable map — start anywhere, follow the links, see how it all fits.
Lectures and talks, for when reading isn't the mood.
Deeper and adjacent material — research, applied courses for working professionals, and the nonprofit.
A few threads, one instinct: take something complex and make it legible. I've been building with technology since the dial-up era and doing applied machine learning since 2009.
I got online telneting to a public library in Nebraska over a 2,400-baud modem and ran BBSs in the '90s. Long before I formally studied AI, the instincts were there — I automated a biology PhD student's data extraction from her cell strains using Photoshop filters, and proposed decision trees for a Columbia master's student's questions about energy use. They were machine-learning problems before I had the name for them.
Then the formal path: a PhD in computer science from the University of Chicago, applied machine learning since 2009, and graduate teaching at UC Berkeley and SMU. I advise companies as a CTO and Chief AI Officer — today at the deep-tech company TAP — and have founded and led Silicon Valley Bank's AI Lab, run special projects alongside Andrew Ng at DeepLearning.AI, led the SAP–MIT Sloan collaboration, and advise a NASA Goddard team on computer vision for Europa and Titan. The through-line is legibility. Work with me →
My other life is visual — a natural home for a Middlebury double major in English and film. I cut film on Media 100, Avid, Final Cut, and Premiere as a photojournalist and multimedia producer, including work with the agency VII Photo.
I printed an exhibit for the war photographer James Nachtwey that was shown in the lobby of the United Nations, and edited films screened in its General Assembly, both in New York. That work continues today as scrocco — the same discipline as the science: choosing what to leave out.
