Wait, you did come here for my face?
You'll have to scroll down a little, then.
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 exception that people with shallow understanding of their tools are allowed to call themselves as “data scientists”, whereas statisticians need qualifications. Also statisticians are allowed to be snarkier.
I do diverse things; these days, probability theory, statistics, music, generative design and machine learning. 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 and Gustaff Harriman Iskendar
Currently I am doing a PhD in statistics with Zdravko Botev at the University of New South Wales.
I'm interested in point process inference, compressive sensing, design grammars, sequential Monte Carlo methods, concatenative synthesis, distributed learning, branching processes, Hilbert-space methods in high dimensional inference, convolution kernel methods, and, the application of all of these to economic modelling, human-machine interaction and sick breakbeats.
