Curtis Forbes — Historien Appliqué, Opérateur de Venture, Bâtisseur Numérique
Curtis Forbes est un opérateur de venture, un chercheur universitaire et un bâtisseur numérique basé entre Edmonton, Bangkok et Manille. Titulaire d'un doctorat en histoire et philosophie des sciences de l'Université de Toronto, Curtis apporte une pensée analytique rigoureuse aux secteurs de la fabrication, des services exécutifs, de l'éducation et du développement de logiciels sur mesure dans la région Asie-Pacifique.
Ses ventures actives incluent Game Day Suits (vêtements de hockey haut de gamme pour les jours de match), Siphraya Bespoke (tailleur à Bangkok), l'approvisionnement et le conseil en fabrication asiatique via la SBMA Freeport Zone, et le développement de logiciels sur mesure pour les PME.
Ses travaux universitaires se concentrent sur le réalisme scientifique et le tournant pragmatique en philosophie des sciences, avec des publications dans Synthese et Metascience, et un travail éditorial pour Spontaneous Generations.
Ses projets logiciels comprennent des simulations physiques interactives, des installations d'art IA, des outils de traduction open-source (i18n-rosetta) et des applications commerciales privées pour des clients industriels et agricoles.
curtis forbes
opérer avec logique.
FORBES BIOS 5.0 — noyau hylomorphique
vérification de la mémoire : 12 ans de fabrication · 7 publications · 30 locales — OK
montage de /home/curtis … terminé
chargement des locales (30) [████████████] OK
prêt. cliquez sur un fichier — ou tapez une commande. 'help' est utile.
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── README.md
Curtis Forbes — philosopher of science turned manufacturing executive turned AI developer.
PhD, History & Philosophy of Science (Toronto, 2017). Twelve years building and running manufacturing operations in the Philippines. Now building open-source machine-translation evaluation tooling for the languages benchmarks forget.
form/ is the research. matter/ is the business. Click any file, or type at the prompt — `help` works, and `ls` doesn't show everything.
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── form/hps.md
Research area: the scientific realism debate — pragmatic, existentialist, and decision-theoretic approaches. Full record: Google Scholar.
## Education
- PhD, History & Philosophy of Science — University of Toronto, 2017. Supervisor: James Robert Brown. SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship; Bombardier CGS; Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
- MA, Philosophy — University of Victoria, 2008. Kenneth Rankin Prize for Best MA Thesis.
- BA with Distinction, Philosophy — University of Alberta, 2006.
## Publications
- A Decision Theoretic Approach to the Scientific Realism Debate — Synthese, under review, 2026
- The Pragmatic Turn in the Scientific Realism Debate — Synthese, 2024 (with Sandy Boucher)
- Editor's Introduction: The Future of the Scientific Realism Debate — Spontaneous Generations, 2018
- A Pragmatic, Existentialist Approach to the Scientific Realism Debate — Synthese, 2017
- Review: Radder, *The Commodification of Academic Research* — Metascience, 2013
- Editor's Introduction: Science and Public Controversy — Spontaneous Generations, 2011
- Review: van Fraassen, *Scientific Representation* — Spontaneous Generations, 2009
Dissertation — University of Toronto, 2017.
## Teaching
Course instructor, University of Toronto, 2011–2016: Scientific Revolutions I & II, Topics in Philosophy of Science, Revolutions in Science. Teaching assistant, seven further courses, 2008–2016.
## Selected talks
Keynote, Bern 2024 · Hobart 2020 · Regina 2018 · Dubrovnik 2016 · Indianapolis 2016 · Toronto 2015 · Cape Town 2014
## Service
Referee: Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis, Synthese, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Journal of Philosophical Research, Science & Education. Managing editor, Spontaneous Generations, 2010 and 2018.
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Machine translation for the languages that benchmarks forget.
Interests: novel tokenizer architectures · low-resource languages · neural machine translation · MT evaluation and metrics · morphologically rich languages · decision-theoretic model selection.
- crk-translate — FST-gated Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) MT pipeline: deterministic morphological verification gating LLM semantic reasoning. Built to OCAP-informed data-sovereignty principles; no community data included, and community consultation is pending before any release. Companion eval-standard plugin (`champollion-lyss`): fail-honest, no bundled data.
- Tooling — Champollion and its predecessor i18n-rosetta live in epistemic-toolworks; the evaluation research program is in benchmarks-evals.
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── form/benchmarks-evals.md
Evaluation as a research interest: what a benchmark score actually measures, when it can be trusted, and how benchmarks decay once models train on them. Continuous with the realism work in hps — the same question, asked of machines: when do a system's outputs deserve belief?
- Champollion — MT evaluation across public and sovereign benchmarks, with contamination lanes to keep memorized test sets from masquerading as quality. The instrument itself lives in epistemic-toolworks.
- GDS AI Playoff Draft · GitHub — a deautomated, non-trainable benchmark: frontier models compete as general managers in an auction-style fantasy draft. Tests multi-agent reasoning, budget discipline, and decision-making under constraints; deliberately slow, human-adjudicated, and resistant to being trained against.
- Decision theory — A Decision Theoretic Approach to the Scientific Realism Debate (Synthese, under review 2026): the formal framework behind both.
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── form/data-sovereignty.md
Working position: language data belongs to the people whose language it is. Systems should be designed so that ownership is structural, not promissory.
- Sovereign benchmarks (Champollion) — test sets that communities create, own, and control, and that the platform never sees. Scores flow out; data never does. Built with professionals, never scraped from them.
- In practice — champollion.dev is offline pending a data sovereignty review: re-verifying every source, license, and community-facing claim against the OCAP® principles the design follows. crk-translate ships no community data, and community consultation comes before any release — not after.
- The other half — data ownership and capability ownership are the same principle; see ai-education.
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── form/ai-education.md
Position: the point of AI education is operator independence — people who can build, run, and govern their own systems. Build it, make it operable, hand it off.
- The simple-builder approach — deterministic tools, logic-as-data, provenance you can read: systems simple enough for their owners to maintain without the builder. Adoption dies when the builder walks out and nobody internal understands what the system does or how to govern it.
- Practiced, not preached — the AFI Quote Machine methodology was adopted and is run internally by the client (software); the same principle drives the tutoring practice (tutoring): build the machinery of learning, not the product.
- The connection to [data sovereignty](#form/data-sovereignty.md) — dependence on a vendor for your data and dependence on a builder for your capability are the same governance failure. Both halves of the work exist to make the dependency unnecessary.
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── form/epistemic-toolworks/champollion/README.md
Champollion is open-source infrastructure for trustworthy machine translation in low-resource languages: the test sets and the map that say who can translate what, how well, on which kinds of text. Non-commercial research.
Two benchmark classes: public (open data — broad, cheap, every method welcome) and sovereign — test sets communities create, own, and control, which the platform never sees (data-sovereignty). Metrics ride on the field's standard tools (sacreBLEU, COMET and relatives); Champollion adds the governed registries, contamination lanes, and public leaderboard around them.
- Public monorepo — the CLI, the eval harness, an MCP server, registries and integrity gates
- champollion.dev — password-gated pending the data sovereignty review; keys on request
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── form/epistemic-toolworks/champollion/cli.md
An internationalization CLI: `npx champollion sync` auto-detects your locale files, their formats, and the target languages — translates what's missing, skips what's done.
- Pre-commit ready — built to sit in a husky/lint-staged hook with SHA-256 change detection, so only edited strings re-translate. This site runs its predecessor exactly that way on every commit.
- Bulk & structured translation — JSON, TOML, YAML, Hugo Markdown (frontmatter + body), and XLIFF interchange documents (bulk XML), with format auto-detection.
- Method-neutral — the translation method is configurable per language pair: commercial APIs (Google Translate, DeepL), LLM backends (OpenRouter's 200+ models, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini), and community-developed plugins benchmarked in the MT Eval Arena.
- Quality gates — wrong-script detection, length-inflation checks, source-echo rejection; intelligent batching (per-backend batch sizing); guards against prototype pollution, path traversal, and code-block corruption in Markdown.
Source: monorepo `cli/`, Apache 2.0. Predecessor: i18n-rosetta — the npm-published engine that still runs this site's thirty locales.
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── form/epistemic-toolworks/champollion/arena.md
The evaluation half: a harness and leaderboard for comparing MT methods across shared corpora — scoring, hashing, and surfacing results. Contamination lanes keep memorized test sets from masquerading as quality; a one-line contribution path lets the crowd donate compute rather than one local run vanishing when the terminal closes.
- Licensing — AGPL-3.0, with an eval-standard plugin exception permitting separately-licensed eval plugins via the public plugin interface.
- champollion-lyss — the Plains Cree eval-standard plugin: FST/gloss validation, fail-honest, no bundled data; use by written permission under Cree data-sovereignty terms (comp-ling).
Research context: benchmarks-evals. Source: monorepo `arena/`.
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── form/epistemic-toolworks/groundtruth.md
Aggregation and visualization of public real-estate data for realtors, buyers, and home inspectors. In development.
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── form/epistemic-toolworks/cosmic-consultant.md
A data visualization experiment. Private access only — ask.
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── form/art/dixie-flatline.md
- Dixie Flatline · dixieflatline.ai · 2026 — voice-first AI construct: custom persona inference, a cloned voice, React Three Fiber volumetric frontend, persona persistence. A ROM of the construct is slotted into this terminal: `cat .dixie.rom`.
This gallery has a lower floor. The mantas were never really retired — try `manta` at the prompt.
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── matter/game-day-suits.md
- Game Day Suits Ltd. · Founder, sole owner & President · 2025–present
Canadian importer of custom menswear and accessories — premium hockey gameday apparel — through partnerships with tailoring operations in Bangkok (siphraya-bespoke) and a fashion studio in Olongapo City (damalerio). Also the corporate vehicle for the enterprise consultancy and AI development practice (software).
Store: gamedaysuits.ca
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── matter/manufacturing.md
- President — International Recreation Corporation (IREC), a subsidiary of International Play Company (iPlayCo) · Subic Bay · 2022–2025
Commercial play-equipment design, manufacturing, and installation for 20+ countries. 130+ employees, nine departments, 5,000+ SKU library. COVID-19 restructuring: 130 → 30 staff with manufacturing capacity preserved, profitability improved, all international delivery obligations met.
- General Manager — IREC · 2019–2022
Returned post-acquisition to restructure operations; maintained production through pandemic-era supply-chain disruption and sustained lockdowns.
- Co-founder, Director of Operations, CFO — IREC · Subic Bay Freeport · 2013–2016
Built the company from startup: 7 → 40+ employees in under three years on minimal capital. Acquired by International Play Company (iPlayCo, TSX-V) in 2016.
Current manufacturing partnerships: siphraya-bespoke (Bangkok tailoring) and damalerio (Olongapo garment studio).
## Services
Manufacturing sourcing (fiberglass, carbon fibre, steelwork, upholstery, carpentry, sewing, injection moulding) · SBMA startup consulting · corporate services via stagecoach · interim management.
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── matter/siphraya-bespoke.md
- Siphraya Bespoke · Partner
Bespoke tailoring in Bangkok — guild-tradition craftsmanship with modern logistics. Manufacturing partner for the Game Day Suits menswear line.
Site: siphrayabespoke.com
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── matter/damalerio.md
- Damalerio · Fashion studio · Olongapo City, Philippines
Pattern making, sample development, and garment manufacturing at scale, with a designer and specialty-manufacturer network through the Fashion Institute of the Philippines. Production studio for Game Day Suits.
Site: damalerio.com
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── matter/jewelry-empire.md
- Jewelry Empire · Co-founder · 2021–present
Jewelry retail through live-selling sales channels — bulk 18K gold fashion jewelry moved direct to buyers. US$2.5M+ annual revenue on ~US$100K initial investment; operated day-to-day by my equity partner, growing and paying dividends.
Retail and sales channeling, not manufacturing — the factory relationships live in manufacturing.
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── matter/stagecoach.md
- Stagecoach · Manila, Philippines
Executive transport and logistics, plus corporate services in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone — administrative and compliance support for Philippine operations.
Site: stagecoach.ph
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── matter/software.md
AI-assisted software development and enterprise consultancy, via Game Day Suits Ltd. The throughline: deterministic systems the client's own people can own and operate — the simple-builder approach.
- AFI Quote Machine · 2025–2026
Deterministic industrial-equipment configurator for Australian Farm Innovations: provenance-traced calculation engine, logic-as-data architecture, integrated AI guidance. Next.js, React, Supabase. Client adopted the methodology and deployed internally.
- Fairfolk Farm — crop-share booking system for a community farm. In development.
Research-grade instruments live with the research: epistemic-toolworks.
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── matter/tutoring.md
- Private tutor — Tutors International · 2017–2019
Specialist "super tutor" placement for a post-secondary student: full-time, live-in. Diagnostic assessment, individualized curriculum design, adaptive pedagogy. Contract renewed for a second year after transformative academic improvement.
Focus: students from globally mobile families — capable and ambitious, with hidden gaps in executive function, study methodology, and subject foundations left by discontinuous schooling. The work builds the systems, not just the grades.
## Services
- Hourly consultation — subject mastery, study-system design, assignment strategy, exam preparation.
- Placement & traveling tutor — full-time immersive support: residential or traveling, daily academic structure, executive-function coaching, university liaison.
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── now.md
- Computational linguistics — i18n-rosetta in production; Champollion monorepo public; champollion.dev gated pending its data sovereignty review.
- This site — rebuilt as a single page; everything is markdown in the tree.
- Base — Edmonton · Bangkok · Manila.
- Reading — machine-translation evaluation; history and philosophy of science.
Last updated: July 6, 2026.
── contact.md
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