Writing

I edited Resistance; Tales from a Post-Antibiotic World, an anthology of short fiction themed around antibiotic resistance. While microbiologists and other scientists have been warning about the dangers of drug-resistant bacteria for years, as far as I know there haven’t been significant reductions in the amount of antibiotics given to livestock, which is a major cause of resistance, and relatively easily reduced. You can buy it on Amazon.

Gaurang Sriramanan and I had some fun messing around with Wasserstein training to build robust image classifiers. (pdf link)

UncategorizedDecember 7, 2023December 7, 2023

What the Hell is a Gaussian Process, Anyway?

Here is the relevant equation for descision theory as expected value

MathJuly 1, 2022

Pascal’s Mugging: Reasoning when you have other things to do

Epistemic status: I don’t think anything I’m saying in this post is completely new (eg see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ap4KfkHyxjYPDiqh2/pascal-s-muggle-infinitesimal-priors-and-strong-evidence and https://www.gwern.net/mugging) apart from maybe the meta-probability framing, but it’s an exercise inContinue readingPascal’s Mugging: Reasoning when you have other things to do

UncategorizedJuly 19, 2021

The Shortest Proof of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems

Picture a mathematician sitting on a jury, determined to find the right verdict. A witness stands up and solemnly says: ” I swear to tell the truth, the whole truthContinue readingThe Shortest Proof of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems

UncategorizedJune 7, 2021

Markov Chains, Mixing Times and Couplings

Say you’re shuffling a deck of cards. It’s poker night and your friends are watching with gimlet eyes to make sure you shuffle properly. Under pressure, you keep shuffling untilContinue readingMarkov Chains, Mixing Times and Couplings

UncategorizedJanuary 4, 2021

Does Biodiversity Prevent Pandemics?

I recently read the surprisingly well-written paper Impacts of biodiversity on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases by Keesing et al. Here are some quick notes and highlights. First,Continue readingDoes Biodiversity Prevent Pandemics?

UncategorizedDecember 21, 2020

Notes on AlphaFold2

These are some cleaned-up notes based on Preetham Venkatesh’s talk to IISc Naturalists on AlphaFold2’s recent CASP win. For a basic summary of what happened, see Deepmind’s blog post AlphaFold:Continue readingNotes on AlphaFold2

UncategorizedOctober 28, 2020

Generating SARS-CoV-2 Protease Inhibitors with Variational Autoencoders

These are some thoughts I wrote up as a retrospective on https://github.com/ddhackiisc/code/blob/master/smiles-pipeline/SMILES%20VAE.ipynb, a project I worked on a few months ago. In future posts I hope to go into moreContinue readingGenerating SARS-CoV-2 Protease Inhibitors with Variational Autoencoders

UncategorizedSeptember 25, 2020

I’ve been reading Mermin’s account of Deutsch’s Problem, and it’s given me a new insight into where the power of quantum computing comes from. If you look at the originalContinue readingQubits and the Kernel Trick: The power of working in a bigger space