About. Currently leading signal evaluation at a fintech.
Fields I find fascinating are decision theory, epistemology, and cosmology. My favourite authors are Deutsch, Isaacson, and Feynman (cliché).
I studied Systems Design EngineeringSystems Design EngineeringA co-op program combining software, mechanical and electrical engineering with design and human factors.x* equals argmin over x in F of the expected value of C of x and xi.Coursework ranged from modelling and optimization to statistics, pattern recognition and scheduling.See an example class profile at uWaterloo.
What I wrote
All writingDirect Atomics: A Post-Mortem
We built an equivariant GNN that cut DFT simulations from months to minutes. Then we learned the market was small, computationalists didn’t want drag-and-drop tools, and companies preferred in-house or open-source models.
Game Theory and Dating
The 37% rule from the secretary problem, applied to dating. Simulations show when holding out for someone better pays off and when it leaves you with no one.
Companies I built
- Direct AtomicsDirect AtomicsWe trained a 13.8M parameter equivariant eSCN model on Alexandria's DFT data to estimate energies and forces from atomic structures.Screening materials faster wasn't enough. Semiconductor customers had billions invested in making their existing materials work. Read the post-mortem here.Neural networks for atomic energies and forcesPost-mortem
- Modern RelayModern RelayAn agent works out how to find something in the company's data. Save that query so the next agent doesn't have to work it out again. Agents can propose changes to the data model too. New facts go onto branches for review, so mistakes can be discarded before they reach the shared graph. The company owns the data and its definition.Reusable queries and reviewed changes to company dataRaised $3M
- λ eignλ eignWe tracked what chatbots said about brands, then worked on making their sites easier to read and cite.Wound it down as tracking tools became interchangeable and Cloudflare moved into markdown for agents.Helping websites show up in chatbot answersWound down
Where I worked
- CloudflareCloudflareBERT-based clustering for high-volume internal support tickets.Pivoted from topic clustering to finding similar historical tickets for technical support engineers.Result: 95% of tickets had useful similarities; about 50% of tickets were resolved 80% faster.Finding similar past tickets for support engineersEarly 2022
- Protocol LabsA legal assistant that answers questions from PDFs. Extract the text, split it into chunks, embed them, then retrieve passages for the model to use.Explored GPT-4 and local models.Answering questions from legal PDFsEarly 2023
- OtherBlackBerry QNX with AWS, Wind River Studio for cloud-native embedded systems, Mount Sinai cytopathology
What I believe
- Mouth closed, don't get fed.
- Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome.
- Desperation never served anybody. Suffering is a choice.
- Life is too short to play zero-sum games (e.g. status).
- Kindness isn't niceness. Signaling virtue is a vice.
- Character is grace when the chips are down.
- Grit is a superpower, but so is quitting.
- Be a hyperrealisthyperrealistAppreciate every reality, even the harsh ones. Despise impractical idealism.Dreams matter, but the people who build great things aren't idle dreamers. They're grounded in reality, understand cause and effect, and use principles to get what they want.. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life.
This is the latest snapshot of my personality archetype.