About me

I have an undergraduate in mathematics from University of Warwick and a masters degree in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning from UCL. I recently finished my PhD at UCL in machine learning where my focus was on meta-learning but I've also worked in machine learning for science, in the areas of genetics and atomistic simulations, here is an overview of my works.

Tech is something that I enjoy tinkering with and I want to be able to use tools which I can mold to fit my needs. My personal tech stack consist of my Lenovo P14s thinkpad laptop, Arch Linux for my operative system and emacs as my OS-within-my-OS where I use the Doom configuration with additional elisp code I've used to make it behave like I want it to. I have a love-hate relationship with code as I really enjoy writing it, reading about it and thinking about ideas to make it better and easier to use, but can be extremely frustrated by how complex and hard to debug it can be.

I meditate every day, something from 40 minutes to 1 hour. The types of meditations I follow are generally from Buddhism so various forms of shamatha (which means concentrating on an object, such as the breath) and vipassana (which means analytical meditation). I also do loving-kindness meditation which I really like.

I'm married to my lovely wife Berfin Simsek, and we currently live in a flat around Washington Square Park in downtown Manhattan. We met at a machine learning summer school during the start of our PhD's so we machine learning in a sense made this possible, she's a tango dance, so here's an emoji poem for our initial romance: 🧘‍♂️🤖❤️💃. We just moved to the US as she is doing her postdoctorate at NYU / Flatiron Institute.

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