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 differences 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 Artifical 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.
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 modeling, 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.
I’m argumentative per default, but flexible. Let me know how you prefer to talk.
3 Follow me
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orcid.org/0000-0001-6077-2684
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