You may have come here looking for one of my other projects. Or maybe you came looking for me? That is sweet. Sure, OK. Hi, I’m Dan MacKinlay.
I’m a statistician and musician from Australia. Musician should be clear. Statistician, though, what’s that? A statistician is the exact same thing as a data scientist or machine learning researcher with the difference that there are qualifications needed to be a statistician, and that we are snarkier.
These days I work across data analysis, music, generative design and machine learning, especially for time series. I’ve been based at various times at such locations as
- Zürich, Switzerland, where I did my MSc in statistics under Professors Sara van de Geer and Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
- Sydney, Australia, where I visualised data for the Powerhouse Museum under Seb Chan
- Bandung, Indonesia, where I worked on interactive music with Common Room with Gustaff Harriman Iskandar and Robi Rusdiana
- University of New South Wales Sydney, where I undertook graduate studies with Zdravko Botev.
I’m currently employed at CSIRO in the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Future Science Platform researching topics in hybrid machine learning methods for physical sciences. I’m on the environmental statistics committee of the Statistical Society of Australia. Minimalist CV here.
My current methods of interest are point process inference, compressive sensing, Gaussian processes, sequential Monte Carlo methods, factor graphs, differentiable learning, branching processes, Hilbert-space methods in high dimensional inference, stochastic differential equations and the application of all of these to physical modelling, engineering and sick breakbeats.
1 My face
Credit to Abdelwahed Khamis for that portrait.
2 Contact me
If you have projects that have a budget for data science, statistics or machine learning, AI or whatever they call it this week, let me know. My current contract will not last forever.
If you do not have a budget but believe your cause is righteous, you are welcome to pitch to me for a slice of my volunteer time. Send a short paragraph making a case for what that time will help (I tend to favour climate- and conflict-risk mitigation causes) and why you think it will be a high-leverage use of my time towards that goal.
3 Follow me
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You can find me on hypothes.is, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, …
orcid.org/0000-0001-6077-2684
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4 Projects
- The most obvious one is this very site, concerning whatever shiny thing distracted me and needed notes taken. My references are online, in particular my own publications.
- On that note, see my Google scholar.
- Lotekno, a Sundanese pop/electronic dance music crossover collaboration that I co-founded.
- Bodywerk, my slammin’ DJ project.
- Synestizer, an audiovisual synthesizer for which I was technical lead.
- Efek Samping, my solo abstract electronic art music project.
- My github hosts various software I wrote.
5 Values and metrics
According to the ClearerThinking.org Intrinsic Values Test, my intrinsic values are
- That I increase my understanding of reality beyond my current understanding
- That humanity does not go extinct
- That I feel connected to other people
- That I believe true rather than false things
- That beautiful things continue to come into existence (e.g. art or music)
- That I do not suffer much during my life
- That I get to experience a wide variety of different things during my life
By their personality test my big-5 personality traits are, on a 5-point scale,
- Openness: 5
- Conscientiousness: 1
- Extraversion: 5
- Agreeableness: 2
- Neuroticism: 1