Austin's Blog
This blog mostly exists to help me clarify my own thoughts on various topics and practice writing. As such, the quality of posts is very mixed. Even when I do write about things which I have expertise in, please don't expect publication-quality writing or fact-checking 😅
You can browse all posts by:
- Per-year archive
- Its feed
- By category
Some highlighted posts (mix of recent best and all-time best):
- 2025-12-18 Review of NeurIPS 2025
- 2025-11-02 Justifying expected utility maximization from first principles (Von Neumann–Morgenstern).
- 2025-08-10 An accessible introduction to mutual information using a d20
- 2025-06-23 Blogging in the LLM age: a second golden age for blogs?
- 2025-06-22 My review guide for machine learning conference papers
- 2025-05-12 Chebyshev Scalarization Explained
- 2025-02-14 Is offline model-based optimization a realistic problem? (I'm not convinced)
- 2025-01-12 Double checking that Gauche's fingerprint kernels are positive definite
- 2024-12-30 Rules of scientific English writing for an international audience.
- 2024-12-10 When should you expect Bayesian optimization to work well?
- 2024-11-04 Overview of the NSGA-II algorithm for multi-objective optimization
- 2024-10-27 Advice for applying for a PhD in AI for science in 2024
- 2024-10-13 Thoughts on Google Vizier
- 2024-10-07 Problems with the top-k diversity metric for diverse optimization
- 2020-02-10 The Monty Hall Problem is Really About Policy Assumptions
- 2018-09-12 Sparse Matrices: 5 Tips and Tricks
- 2018-08-21 Why you should never be certain of your beliefs: a Bayesian perspective
Sometimes I write about topics which I know more about. You may find posts with the following tags useful:
- Bayesian optimization, which was essentially my PhD topic.
- Machine learning
- Retrosynthesis, which I also worked on during my PhD.
- PhD (since I completed a PhD)
- Websites, since I created and continue to maintain this website.
- Blog, since this website contains a blog where I am trying to write more frequently.
- Announcements about me and/or this website.
Why is my blog here (and not somewhere else)
Good question. For now, 2 reasons:
- My blog started on my website when I first made a website and I've never been motivated enough to move it.
- A general desire to avoid "building my castle in someone else's kingdom."