https://archy.deberker.com Blog and notes on climate, data, software, and work. en-gb Tue, 03 Jan 2023 17:08:18 GMT https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-power https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-power Tue, 03 Jan 2023 17:08:18 GMT The UK discarded 6% of its windpower last year, at a cost of almost £1bn. What’s going on, and how can we fix it? https://archy.deberker.com/blog/net-zero-its-the-journey-not-the-destination https://archy.deberker.com/blog/net-zero-its-the-journey-not-the-destination Sun, 13 Nov 2022 23:05:23 GMT The route we take to Net Zero determines how much CO2 we emit, and how much warmer we get climate net-zero https://archy.deberker.com/blog/blockchain-solves-none-of-the-problems-with-carbon-offsets https://archy.deberker.com/blog/blockchain-solves-none-of-the-problems-with-carbon-offsets Mon, 25 Apr 2022 20:47:46 GMT Blockchain solves none of the problems with carbon offsetting, but carbon dioxide removal solves many of them. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/what-do-energy-suppliers-actually-do-and-why-do-they-go-bust https://archy.deberker.com/blog/what-do-energy-suppliers-actually-do-and-why-do-they-go-bust Mon, 24 Jan 2022 23:12:47 GMT We don’t think much about what suppliers do – except when they go really wrong. What service are they actually providing? https://archy.deberker.com/blog/why-data-scientists-should-work-on-climate-change https://archy.deberker.com/blog/why-data-scientists-should-work-on-climate-change Sat, 30 Oct 2021 14:44:36 GMT There’s never been a better time for data scientists to work on climate careers climate startups https://archy.deberker.com/blog/minimal-viable-developer-acing-your-first-month-in-software https://archy.deberker.com/blog/minimal-viable-developer-acing-your-first-month-in-software Mon, 16 Aug 2021 07:20:50 GMT Get fast at contributing code and flourish in your first software role https://archy.deberker.com/blog/sustainable-energy-without-the-hot-air-in-2021 https://archy.deberker.com/blog/sustainable-energy-without-the-hot-air-in-2021 Sun, 25 Apr 2021 15:03:12 GMT How does Britain’s power profile in 2021 compare to the plans laid out in Sir David Mackay’s 2008 Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air? https://archy.deberker.com/blog/adding-interactive-plotly-graphs-to-wordpress https://archy.deberker.com/blog/adding-interactive-plotly-graphs-to-wordpress Fri, 09 Apr 2021 21:50:36 GMT Tips for adding interactive Plotly graphs to Wordpress and optimizing them for mobile https://archy.deberker.com/blog/should-we-be-building-west-facing-solar-panels https://archy.deberker.com/blog/should-we-be-building-west-facing-solar-panels Thu, 08 Apr 2021 02:21:40 GMT The UK’s peak energy demand is at sunset, so should we be orienting new solar panels towards the West? https://archy.deberker.com/blog/dodging-pitfalls-when-transitioning-from-academia-to-industry https://archy.deberker.com/blog/dodging-pitfalls-when-transitioning-from-academia-to-industry Sat, 20 Feb 2021 22:12:02 GMT Moving to industry can be a fantastic choice for some people, but getting your first job can be hard https://archy.deberker.com/blog/how-would-hayek-solve-climate-change https://archy.deberker.com/blog/how-would-hayek-solve-climate-change Mon, 04 Jan 2021 04:11:02 GMT Hayek’s 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society gives a lucid account of how carbon prices can simplify efforts to understand our environmental impact. climate change economics hayek https://archy.deberker.com/blog/things-i-didnt-understand-about-starting-a-company-until-i-tried https://archy.deberker.com/blog/things-i-didnt-understand-about-starting-a-company-until-i-tried Sat, 12 Dec 2020 20:51:36 GMT No matter how many books you read, it’s a different story when you’ve got skin in the game. Some notes from starting Cholla, a remote team building company, in Summer 2020. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/what-does-gpt-3-mean-for-ai https://archy.deberker.com/blog/what-does-gpt-3-mean-for-ai Tue, 13 Oct 2020 22:15:54 GMT The biggest AI news of 2020 was the success of OpenAI’s monstrous new language model, GPT-3. In this post I summarize why GPT-3 has caused such a splash, before highlighting some consequences for companies building things with AI. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/organizing-applied-machine-learning-research https://archy.deberker.com/blog/organizing-applied-machine-learning-research Mon, 11 May 2020 23:12:02 GMT Applied Machine Learning research is a bit different from standard software engineering. This post summarizes some of the things I’ve learned about leading applied ML teams. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/lockdown-projects-corona-calculator-glass-of-wine-and-weather-window https://archy.deberker.com/blog/lockdown-projects-corona-calculator-glass-of-wine-and-weather-window Sun, 10 May 2020 22:12:11 GMT Lockdown in Montreal prompted a spree of building: The Corona Calculator, A Glass of Wine May Help, and Weather Window. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-customer-is-the-enemy https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-customer-is-the-enemy Sun, 28 Apr 2019 19:20:30 GMT It’s a bit of a cliché, but reading a tiny bit of military strategy can inform your thinking about startups. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/predicting-the-performance-of-deep-learning-models https://archy.deberker.com/blog/predicting-the-performance-of-deep-learning-models Sun, 14 Apr 2019 21:03:37 GMT It’s widely acknowledged that the recent successes of Deep Learning rest heavily upon the availability of huge amounts of data. Vision was the first domain in which the promise of DL was realised, probably because of the availability of large datasets such as ImageNet. The recent surge of simulators for RL further illustrates that as we \[…\] machine learning neural networks https://archy.deberker.com/blog/abuse-detection-on-twitter-a-collaboration-with-amnesty-international https://archy.deberker.com/blog/abuse-detection-on-twitter-a-collaboration-with-amnesty-international Sun, 27 Jan 2019 18:00:11 GMT At the NeurIPS 2018 workshop on AI for Social Good we presented a piece of work we performed in collaboration with Amnesty International.  We leveraged a mixture of crowdsourcing and deep learning to study the nature and quantity of abuse suffered by prominent women on twitter. At this point quite a lot has been written about the project: if \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/how-intelligent-are-our-machines https://archy.deberker.com/blog/how-intelligent-are-our-machines Thu, 07 Sep 2017 18:39:33 GMT Human intelligence is remarkably correlated across domains. Do we mistakenly generalize this when assessing machines? https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-right-energy-at-the-right-time https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-right-energy-at-the-right-time Mon, 12 Jun 2017 09:00:19 GMT During my ASI Fellowship I worked with Origami Energy, optimizing Demand Side Response programs for industrial energy usage. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/driverless-cars-and-the-attention-economy https://archy.deberker.com/blog/driverless-cars-and-the-attention-economy Thu, 08 Jun 2017 13:49:06 GMT Driverless cars aren’t just a matter of convenience: they’re liberating hours of the day you could be buying things via Google! https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-science-of-startups https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-science-of-startups Sun, 09 Apr 2017 19:36:31 GMT If you squint a bit, building startups and doing science look kind of similar. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/building-a-burns-bot-2-making-a-slackbot https://archy.deberker.com/blog/building-a-burns-bot-2-making-a-slackbot Wed, 08 Mar 2017 09:00:46 GMT Here we take the Markov-chain based Burn’s Bot we created in the previous post and turn it into a living, breathing Slackbot to deliver Burns on demand. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/building-a-burns-bot-1-markov-models-for-poetry-generation https://archy.deberker.com/blog/building-a-burns-bot-1-markov-models-for-poetry-generation Tue, 07 Mar 2017 10:17:30 GMT How to generate synthetic poetry with the Markov models and a wee dram of whisky, https://archy.deberker.com/blog/tips-from-the-other-side-writing-a-thesis https://archy.deberker.com/blog/tips-from-the-other-side-writing-a-thesis Mon, 12 Dec 2016 12:30:33 GMT After a relatively painless month or so of writing, I’ve finished my thesis. I’m yet to be examined, so whilst I can’t comment on how to write a good thesis, I’ve had a few thoughts on the process of getting from start to finish. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/three-reasons-youre-surprised-that-trump-won https://archy.deberker.com/blog/three-reasons-youre-surprised-that-trump-won Wed, 09 Nov 2016 15:27:12 GMT Was Donald Trump’s election truly an upset? Some explanations from psychology for why we were more surprised than we ought to have been. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-practical-2-decoding-mnist https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-practical-2-decoding-mnist Thu, 04 Aug 2016 15:37:54 GMT MNIST (Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology) is a database of handwritten digits. Compiled by Yann LeCun and colleagues, it’s a classic benchmark problem in machine learning. Pleasingly, you can write a model in Tensorflow that does a decent job of decoding the digits. Having got to grips with Python and some of the Tensorflow \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-book-chapter-3-numerical-computation https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-book-chapter-3-numerical-computation Mon, 20 Jun 2016 10:54:30 GMT This chapter was a bit of pot-pourri of things the authors wanted to tell us before we got on to machine learning proper. Much of it was straightforward, and then there were a few stingers, such as the bits about directional gradients. Typical problems we need to be aware of in using a digital computer to \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/new-paper-how-others-fortunes-affect-your-happiness-predicts-generosity https://archy.deberker.com/blog/new-paper-how-others-fortunes-affect-your-happiness-predicts-generosity Fri, 17 Jun 2016 08:12:06 GMT This week we published a paper building on Robb Rutledge’s 2014 happiness model (my summary here), but asking whether we could also capture fluctuations in happiness that relate to what’s happening to other people around you. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-practical-1-intro-to-tensorflow https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-practical-1-intro-to-tensorflow Fri, 27 May 2016 10:37:58 GMT This week in the Deep Learning Reading Group we worked through some introductory exercises on Tensorflow, based upon the provided tutorials and edited by Zeb and I. It’s targeted at those with minimal Python experience, but who have programmed in Matlab. It’s largely self-explanatory; a collection of code examples with some discursive text, and a few snippets \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-textbook-chapter-2-probability https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-textbook-chapter-2-probability Thu, 19 May 2016 12:14:25 GMT As part of the Max Planck Centre’s Deep Learning reading group, I’m working my way through the soon-to-be released Deep Learning textbook. These posts are my informal notes for each chapter. Find my notes from chapter 1 here. Thanks again to Zeb & Toby for edits. This week we were back on slightly firmer ground, dealing \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-textbook-notes-for-chapter-1 https://archy.deberker.com/blog/deep-learning-textbook-notes-for-chapter-1 Thu, 12 May 2016 18:30:03 GMT The Dolan lab group (and friends) is working through the soon-to-be-released Deep Learning textbook, authored by Goodfellow Bengio, and Courville, and somewhat miraculously available in html form prior to publication by MIT press. At a risk of exposing the depths of my ignorance to the internet, I’m going to try and publish my notes on each chapter \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/setting-up-tensorflow https://archy.deberker.com/blog/setting-up-tensorflow Sat, 23 Apr 2016 08:21:56 GMT Alternative method from the Asimov institute. This worked fine for me using an Anaconda install of Python on Mac OS X, except I had to remove the ‘–update’ flag when doing the installation with pip. Their version involves direct installation on OS X rather than installation on a virtual Linux machine via Docker, which is \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-happiness-project https://archy.deberker.com/blog/the-happiness-project Sun, 22 Nov 2015 17:33:16 GMT The Happiness Project is a project I’ve been involved in for just over two years, which began as a low-key attempt to explore why a UNICEF report found British children to be very unhappy relative to children in similar countries and blew up into a show involving 12 young adults and 6 academics performed at the Edinburgh festival. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/whats-the-deal-with-modafinil https://archy.deberker.com/blog/whats-the-deal-with-modafinil Sun, 22 Nov 2015 16:46:37 GMT Scientists need to stop hyping smart drugs. We don’t know if or how they work and what the long term consequences of use might be. https://archy.deberker.com/blog/running-deep-reinforcement-learning-models https://archy.deberker.com/blog/running-deep-reinforcement-learning-models Sun, 12 Jul 2015 11:54:10 GMT Deep Mind’s Nature paper has created an understandable buzz. In it they create an algorithm than can learn to play a huge slew of Atari computer games better than a human expert. Particularly compelling are the videos, which I encourage you to check out. One delightful feature of the paper is that they provide the \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/new-paper-substantia-nigra-and-learning https://archy.deberker.com/blog/new-paper-substantia-nigra-and-learning Sat, 23 Aug 2014 13:27:46 GMT Robb Rutledge and I have a piece just out in the Journal of Neuroscience. It’s a Journal Club article – a ‘short, critical, review’ of a recent paper published by Ramayya et al in Michael Kahana’s group at University of Pennsylvania. The paper concerns a simple learning experiment performed in a group of people who \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/happiness https://archy.deberker.com/blog/happiness Sat, 16 Aug 2014 13:01:59 GMT My colleagues recently published a seminal paper examining the dynamics of happiness within a prediction-error framework (Eh? What does this mean? Read on to find out). https://archy.deberker.com/blog/einstein-in-berlin https://archy.deberker.com/blog/einstein-in-berlin Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:57:50 GMT At the end of July I enjoyed a few days in Berlin, attending the 4th (and, sadly, final) Einstein Fellowship Symposium on Decision-making, organised by my supervisor Ray Dolan. After 2 days of exceptionally high-quality talks and posters, we finished with a superb boat trip around Potsdam, a rather plush suburb riddled with lakes and \[…\] https://archy.deberker.com/blog/sfn-2013-san-diego https://archy.deberker.com/blog/sfn-2013-san-diego Sun, 19 Jan 2014 13:57:01 GMT This November, me and a gang from Queen Square descended, along with 30’000 other neuroscientists, upon San Diego, California. Amongst this maelstrom of intimidatingly brilliant minds I was to be found presenting a poster on happiness in a social context, which you can read here if you’re interested.