John Boik received his PhD in biomedical sciences from the University of Texas, Health Sciences Center, Houston, where he studied cancer biology. He completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University, in the Department of Statistics, and is currently courtesy faculty at Oregon State University, Environmental Sciences Graduate Program. His BS is in civil engineering, from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has broad experience modeling biological and societal processes, including utility processes. His professional interests include Bayesian statistical methods, scientific machine learning (merging dynamical systems theory with machine learning), graph representations of data, machine learning on graphs, and Bayesian approaches to artificial intelligence, in particular, active inference. Active inference has potential to model cooperation and communication between intelligent agents, such as intelligent IoT devices. He is a Senior Principle Data Scientist at Itron Idea Labs, where he constructs machine learning models for use by Idea Labs and others at Itron, and assists in evaluation of data science proposals, strategies, and approaches.