You may have come here looking for one of my other projects, or what I am up to right now.
Or maybe you did come here looking for me? That is sweet of you. Sure, OK. Hi, I’m Dan MacKinlay.
1 Research interests
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, but on average snarkier.
My speciality is the application of statistical inference to AI Safety and the process of scientific discovery, especially in geospatial settings. My methods of interest include Bayesian neural nets, sparse coding, Gaussian processes, sequential Monte Carlo methods, factor graphs, Scientific machine learning… actually quite a lot of stuff.
1.1 Publications
- Dan MacKinlay (2025): Gaussian process models for geospatial data and physics (See the blog post)
- Dan MacKinlay et al. (2025): A short useful note connecting Ensemble Kalman filters to pathwise empirical Gaussian processes; this one is a bit technical but useful for the right audience.
- Dabrowski et al. (2023): Bayesian inference for bushfire risk using PINNs
- Pagendam et al. (2023): geospatial neural nets for hydrology
- Takamoto et al. (2022): benchmarking PDE solvers based on neural nets; see pdebench/PDEBench: An Extensive Benchmark for Scientific Machine Learning
- PhD thesis (Rare event simulation and audio synthesis, together at last)
- MSc thesis (Predicting virality of Youtube videos using a mathematical model of sparse branching dynamics).
- others (Ben Rached et al. 2020; Botev, MacKinlay, and Chen 2017; Daniel MacKinlay and Botev 2019; Dan MacKinlay et al. 2021)
Or check my Google Scholar.
2 Previously
I’ve been based at various times in places like
- 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.
3 Contact me
If you have projects with 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 AI, climate and conflict risk mitigation causes) and why you think it will be a high-leverage use of my time towards that goal.
4 Follow me
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You can find me on hypothes.is, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, …

5 Projects
What I am doing in general:
- The most obvious project is this very site, concerning whatever shiny thing distracted me and needed notes taken.
- 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.
6 Values and metrics
By the ClearerThinking.org’s 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 get to experience a wide variety of different things during my life
7 My face
Thanks to Abdelwahed Khamis for that portrait.