Antony Van der Mude
Building intelligent systems. Asking harder questions.
I'm a data scientist and AI/ML engineer with a career spanning healthcare, cybersecurity, IoT, and education — and an intellectual life that has never stayed inside any one of those lanes.
The work
I founded Antony Van der Mude LLC to do focused, high-quality consulting work directly with clients who need serious AI and data science capability without the overhead of a large firm. My technical work centers on NLP, machine learning pipelines, and agentic AI systems — with particular depth in language model architectures, semantic embeddings, clustering, and conversational agents.
I operate as a single-member consultancy: when you engage me, you work with me. I take a selective number of engagements at a time so that each receives the depth and sustained attention it deserves.
The research
Alongside my engineering work, I publish academic research on questions that span computation, biology, medicine, and philosophy. My papers include a proposed information-theoretic framework for cancer treatment (Biosystems, 2022), a theory of structure encoding in DNA (Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2020), and work on causally active metaphysical realism and Aristotelian hylomorphism in the context of quantum foundations (Quantum Speculations, 2019).
I don't think of this as separate from my engineering work. The same disposition that drives me to ask why a model behaves as it does — rather than simply accepting that it does — also drives the research. The technical and the philosophical are, for me, the same inquiry in different registers.
Values & orientation
My values are shaped by Unitarian Universalist pluralism, Taoist philosophy, and a scientific pantheism that finds the natural world genuinely astonishing. I approach ethical questions — including the ethics of AI systems — empirically rather than dogmatically, treating them as Consequentialism as an Experimental Discipline suggests: as matters to be investigated with rigor, not resolved by decree.
These aren't personal quirks kept separate from the work. They inform how I approach system design: with genuine concern for the humans the system will affect, with scepticism toward engagement-maximization as a proxy for human flourishing, and with a commitment to building things that can be understood and interrogated rather than things that merely function.
Location
Based in Burlington, Massachusetts.