Noting the passing in May of Neil Raden, who was one of the most unforgettable characters I ever met in my computer trade press days. His death came after a long illness, progress of which he shared with the tech communities in which he’d long been a notable voice.
Neil led an independent consulting and analysis practice as the head of Hire Brains in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was his own kind of 60s guy, in my experience. That is, he was goateed, a bit skeptical, but truly enthusiastic about technological advances that influenced his era.
Like many others, he came out of fields that weren’t essentially technological, but which were channels to building out new computerized methods, working from first principles. This led him on a winding journey as the mainframe gave way to the PC and the cloud, with problems to solve every step of the way. In his case, the seed soil was advanced mathematical studies and actuarial experience. He forged a home-grown view on technology, with special emphasis on databases, data warehouses and common-sense problem solving.
I got to know Neil on the data warehouse beat, which I covered for Software Magazine, Application Development Trends and SearchDataManagement.com.
When a reporter asked him a question he’d break it down carefully, and look at it from different perspectives…most of which had yet to occur to you. Each question invited yet another strategy for writing your story — that or ten other ones. With Neil, it wasn’t hard to jump from IoT to tensor matrices to federated learning to differential privacy and to data lake houses (tho, the latter was not his favorite!).
With some disappointment, you’d bring the conversation back to the original topic – you got a deadline, right? But, for my money, any conversation with Neil was a master class in technology assessment. And if I wanted to talk about Telstar or the Perceptron, he was down with all that too. Following Neil’s train of thought could be like riding the notes of jazz player’s solo.
In the late teens, I’d see him at Oracle Open World in San Franciso, and he’d talk about topological algebra – like chaos theory, a lodestone interest of his. A couple of years later, he’s speaking with me for a story on data and IoT, and topological algebra magically comes up again! I still can’t figure it out. But I try.
On his health, I have no way of knowing if Neil saw what was coming back then, but I do know he was into being here and now. Recalling how Neil closed an interview, after some flights of technology fancy. He’d just shown me a picture of nature in his adopted home of New Mexico.
He said: “I’ll tell you something really funny, Jack. I’m looking out my window right now.I look out the window and it is beautiful. The land rises up. And on the other side of that is the Rio Grande, and on the other side of the Rio Grande is … ” My recording stopped there.
Well, Neil Raden is sure on the other side of the Rio Grande now. I have to say thanks, I appreciated you sharing your time!
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Neil Raden: From a Reporter’s Notebook –
On edge computing and edge AI
One thing I’m concerned about is that the edge is far too important to be controlled by a couple of mega vendors. Once that becomes proprietary it’ll be a disaster.
Why he studied math
I studied math. I studied math because I didn’t want to write papers, and look what I do now!
Question to ask of a new technology paradigm, for example, event processing
The question is ‘can an organization really change the way it operates?’ The technology may not be the hardest part.
On the data lakehouse
That one really cracks me up. Okay, so we build a data lake and now we can’t do anything with it. Oh, don’t worry we have a new thing — we’re going to call it a data lake house. And we’re going to give you some analytical functions like a data warehouse on top of it. And, you know, I’m trying not to laugh.
There are numerous postings on LinkedIn that readily show how very many Neil touched. You can find that feeling, and a sense of Neil’s dedication, in a recent tribute by diginomica.com Editor John Reed, who made sure to cast a light on Neil’s recent writings on AI Ethics, an area he was especially dedicated to covering. Raden’s writings for the publication can be found here. Some earlier work is also to be found on Medium.
Neil is survived by his wife, TS (Susie) Wiley, his children Mara, Aja, Jacob, Max, and Zoe, eight grandchildren, a brother, Jonathan Raden, and a sister, Audrey Raden.