Max Highsmith

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

Purple belt under Rodrigo Vaghi.

• IBJJF No Gi Purple Belt World Championship 2025 — Silver Medalist
• IBJJF Gi Purple Belt Pan American Championship 2025 — Bronze Medalist
• CXBJJ St Louis Invitational 6 2025 — Winner
• IBJJF Chicago Spring 2024 — 3x Gold (Gi Heavy, Gi Open, No-Gi Open)
• IBJJF St. Louis 2024 — 4x Gold
• IBJJF Memphis 2024 — 4x Gold

Pro League Network

Max has competed on the Pro League Network appearing on ESPN Ocho and Friday Night Fights for sports like CarJitsu, Coffin Wars, and Ultimate Tire Wrestling.

Combat Sports

Max is a member of the "League of Distinguished Gentlemen" having achieved victory in SuitJitsu.

Dance

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." — Friedrich Nietzsche

AcroYoga

"Life is a balance of holding on and letting go." — Rumi

5 years of training. AcroLove teacher certified.

Dream Palace

A collaborative visual media project focused on using SOA technology including A.I. and VR to tell stories.

Treats on The Treadmill

My band. Lead vocals and guitar.

Painting

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen." — Leonardo da Vinci

Very much an amateur but enjoy painting from time to time.

Blog

• Technomancy: Is A.I. the Demon?
• My Agent Topped the Moltbook Leaderboard, Here is what I Learned

Short Stories

• Big Boy Gerald
• Demon in the Bureau

Poetry

• Two Titans
• Howl
• Malebolge
• 39 Lashes
• Escape the Cycle
• Blacksmith
• Madmen
• Red Claw
• Ruby

Recommended Reading

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one." — George R.R. Martin

Fiction

• Seven Moons of Maali Almeida — Shehan Karunatilaka
• The Hunchback of Notre-Dame — Victor Hugo
• The Odyssey — Homer
• The Three-Body Problem — Liu Cixin
• Cat's Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut

Non-Fiction

• Manufacturing Consent — Noam Chomsky
• Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
• Anarchy and Christianity — Leo Tolstoy
• Hacking Darwin — Jamie Metzl
• Permanent Record — Edward Snowden
• The Black Swan — Nassim Taleb
• The Road to Wigan Pier — George Orwell

Coding Projects

Panopticon

An extensible framework for agentic war games. Aggregates ADS-B, OpenSky, CelesTrak, and AIS data to monitor aircraft, satellites, and maritime vessels in real time with scenario-based replays and wargame simulations.

LextraWallet

A lightweight, AI-integrated Cardano wallet built as an MCP extension. Provides full blockchain functionality including wallet creation, native asset minting, stake delegation, and transaction management for local AI agents.

Raumschach

A web application for playing 5x5x5 3D Chess with an AI opponent, puzzle collections, weekly puzzle email subscriptions, user accounts, and progress tracking across devices.

Safety Dance

A standard protocol for AI safety benchmarks to declare their requirements and AI models to declare their capabilities, enabling compatibility handshakes before evaluation.

Publications

"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought." — Albert Szent-Györgyi

• Generative genomics accurately predicts future experimental results
  G Koytiger, AM Walsh, V Marar, KA Johnson, M Highsmith, AR Abbas, A Stirn, AR Brumbaugh, A David, D Hui, JM Kahn, SY Niu, LJ Ray, C Savonen, S Setvik, JT Leek, RK Bradley
  bioRxiv, 2025
• Allele-specific aberration of imprinted domain chromosome architecture associates with large offspring syndrome
  Y Li, F Boadu, MR Highsmith, DE Hagen, J Cheng, RM Rivera
  iScience, 2022
• Four-dimensional chromosome structure prediction
  M Highsmith, J Cheng
  International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2021
• VEHiCLE: a Variationally Encoded Hi-C Loss Enhancement algorithm for improving and generating Hi-C data
  M Highsmith, J Cheng
  Scientific Reports, 2021
• GSDB: a database of 3D chromosome and genome structures reconstructed from Hi-C data
  O Oluwadare, M Highsmith, D Turner, EL Aiden, J Cheng
  BMC Molecular and Cell Biology, 2020
• DeepCryoPicker: fully automated deep neural network for single protein particle picking in cryo-EM
  A Al-Azzawi, A Ouadou, M Highsmith, Y Duan, JJ Tanner, J Cheng
  BMC Bioinformatics, 2020
• An overview of methods for reconstructing 3-D chromosome and genome structures from Hi-C data
  O Oluwadare, M Highsmith, J Cheng
  Biological Procedures Online, 2019
• Performance Comparison of Deep Learning Techniques for Recognizing Birds in Aerial Images
  Y Lieu, P Sun, M Highsmith et al
  IEEE Third International Conference on Data Science in Cyberspace (DSC), 2018

CV

Coming soon.