Archy de Berker

How to signal that you're a driven person who solves important problems.

The UK discarded 6% of its windpower last year, at a cost of almost £1bn.

The route we take to Net Zero determines how much CO2 we emit, and how much warmer we get

Blockchain solves none of the problems with carbon offsetting, but carbon dioxide removal solves many of them.

We don’t think much about what suppliers do – except when they go really wrong.

There’s never been a better time for data scientists to work on climate

Get fast at contributing code and flourish in your first software role

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?

Tips for adding interactive Plotly graphs to Wordpress and optimizing them for mobile

The UK’s peak energy demand is at sunset, so should we be orienting new solar panels towards the West?

Moving to industry can be a fantastic choice for some people, but getting your first job can be hard

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.

No matter how many books you read, it’s a different story when you’ve got skin in the game.

The biggest AI news of 2020 was the success of OpenAI’s monstrous new language model, GPT-3.

Applied Machine Learning research is a bit different from standard software engineering.

Lockdown in Montreal prompted a spree of building: The Corona Calculator, A Glass of Wine May Help, and Weather Window.

It’s a bit of a cliché, but reading a tiny bit of military strategy can inform your thinking about startups.

It’s widely acknowledged that the recent successes of Deep Learning rest heavily upon the availability of huge amounts of data.

At the NeurIPS 2018 workshop on AI for Social Good we presented a piece of work we performed in collaboration with Amnesty International.

Human intelligence is remarkably correlated across domains.

During my ASI Fellowship I worked with Origami Energy, optimizing Demand Side Response programs for industrial energy usage.

Driverless cars aren’t just a matter of convenience: they’re liberating hours of the day you could be buying things via Google!

If you squint a bit, building startups and doing science look kind of similar.

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.

How to generate synthetic poetry with the Markov models and a wee dram of whisky,

After a relatively painless month or so of writing, I’ve finished my thesis.

Was Donald Trump’s election truly an upset?

MNIST (Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology) is a database of handwritten digits.

This chapter was a bit of pot-pourri of things the authors wanted to tell us before we got on to machine learning proper.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alternative method from the Asimov institute.

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 i…

Scientists need to stop hyping smart drugs.

Deep Mind’s Nature paper has created an understandable buzz.

Robb Rutledge and I have a piece just out in the Journal of Neuroscience.

My colleagues recently published a seminal paper examining the dynamics of happiness within a prediction-error framework (Eh?

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.

This November, me and a gang from Queen Square descended, along with 30’000 other neuroscientists, upon San Diego, California.