Software architect.
AI adoption advisor.
Founder, Nooron Collaboratory · Osoyoos, British Columbia, Canada
I help knowledge-intensive firms decide what AI is actually for in their work, and then get their people using it well — practically, safely, and without handing the firm's know-how to a vendor.
How I help
Strategy & leadership briefings
A clear-eyed session on what AI changes for a practice like yours, what it doesn't, and how to find out cheaply before committing budget.
Training & change management
Hands-on sessions by role — designers, project managers, business development, administration — built on your own documents and workflows. People leave with habits, not slides.
Collaboration technology
Selecting, integrating, or building the tools a team thinks with: shared knowledge, provenance, and the plumbing that keeps AI output accountable.
AI solution architecture
From pilot to production, including private, self-hosted models when client data and intellectual property can't leave the firm.
Fractional AI architect
Senior judgment on staff for organizations that need it without a full-time hire — governance, vendor evaluation, and a way to tell whether it's working.
Why me
I'm a builder, not a reseller. I use today's AI tools every day to ship real software, I run local and self-hosted models, and I've spent decades building the machinery that makes AI useful rather than merely impressive: knowledge graphs, ontologies, semantic databases, and interactive visualization.
I've led my own organizations through technology change — a 15-person software firm I founded and chaired, a government laboratory-systems team, university research consortia — and I've been teaching technical skills to non-technical professionals since my first database courses for scientific staff in the early '90s.
I don't sell any vendor's platform. I work in English; training materials and written deliverables can be produced in whatever language your team works in, and I'm glad to work alongside a translator or an in-house facilitator.
- SINCE 1989AI risk, impact and strategy work — co-founded an existential-risk think tank before the field had a name
- SINCE 1991Knowledge engineering and collaboration technology: knowledge graphs, ontologies, semantic databases
- ONGOINGDynamic knowledge visualization — interactive tools that let people see what a system knows and why
- 2+ YEARSDaily, hands-on use of AI coding and agent tools, shipping production software
Selected work
- Connectifier — fullstack engineer at the Thiel-funded recruiting-intelligence startup, later acquired by LinkedIn.
- The Orlando Project & HuViz — architect of an interactive semantic-visualization platform for a digital-humanities consortium (Alberta, Guelph, McGill); presented at DH2019, Utrecht.
- Emergence by Design — founder and chair of a 15-person software firm shipping SaaS across e-commerce, academic publishing, legal, real estate and recruiting; built GetCited.org, a Google Scholar predecessor.
- CatPub — database-publishing engine producing ~10,000 unique catalogue pages a day for Western Canada's largest real-estate boards.
- Government of Alberta — led development of a multi-disciplinary laboratory information management system and trained scientific and administrative staff.
- PyOKBC — Python implementation of the Open Knowledge Base Connectivity standard, a single interface over ontologies, databases, XML and topic maps.
Writing
Current research
At Nooron I lead ThinkerToys: tools that let teams think together with AI as a documented participant — every claim with its source, every perspective kept distinct — rather than as an oracle.
Pre-release. Follow the blog or get in touch about early access.
Contact
sfm@smurp.com · linkedin.com/in/smurp · Pacific time (UTC−8/−7)