About AndrewPak.AI...
Or — APAI, as I've recently started calling it! :D
While I’ve been busy working on my new posts covering the absolute “mathological” (porte-manteau of mathematical and mythological 😉) beast that was Chapter 2 of Elad Hazan’s absolutely fantastic ML theory textbook called the Introduction to Online Convex Optimization, I decided to give my brain some much-needed (and maybe even much-deserved!) rest, by letting it work on producing some light prose instead of forcing it to hyper-focus on mathematical definitions, equations, theorems, lemmas, and the proofs thereof. 😮💨
Wow — that’s one helluva long sentence that I don’t want to re-read, so I’m keeping it as-is, sorry! 🤷🏼♂️
Let’s not get distracted from the task at hand, for I have little time to get this done, as I need to go to bed soon!
So the product of the afore-mentioned “brain rest” was my new About page that is now available for anyone who stumbles upon my Substack and it provides the curious visitor with a more fleshed out introduction to… me! 😃
My very first post was already there to partially fill that void, but it wouldn’t be very considerate of me to force the said kind visitor to have to dig around for the most basic of information. Thus, an About page is actually quite important to have in place, so it can provide new visitors with details they might be curious about (pun 100% intended! ✅).
In addition to writing up the content, I also updated the branding of my Substack with a new logo, “wordmark”, and an actual profile picture that’s not just a default placeholder.
And voilà — I am including the exact content of my new About page below, to save you, kind reader, the extra click! And also for record-keeping purposes, as I’m sure the page will evolve as I naturally evolve myself. 🎉
To Everyone Who Kindly Decided to Visit:
Welcome to Andrew Pak’s Machine Learning substack! 🔥🤖🎉
My name is Andrew, but I am also known by several nicknames given to me by my very diverse group of friends, such as Andrewid (pronounced “android”, like a humanoid robot, because I am a machine), Pac-Man (obviously), 白马 / 白馬 / bái mǎ / White Horse (because I am very energetic in my dance fitness classes 🦄⚡️🎉), and my favourite — Paani, given to me by my absolutely amazing niece, because I am just like Paani the hydrologist on the popular kids animated show Octonauts.
I am a computer science graduate who’s worked as a Full-Stack Software Engineer at both large multi-national companies with cool perks and small start-ups with insane hours. But over the past several years I have become absolutely fascinated and blown away by the field of machine learning and ended up becoming a full-time Machine Learning Engineer, focusing on ML applications to music, such as deep learning-based Music Information Retrieval (MIR).
I love the MIR subfield specifically because I am very passionate about both listening to and creating music and learned how to play the guitar as an adult and am now also learning how to play the piano, and am absolutely loving it! It speaks to the deepest parts of my heart and soul.
However, I love all ML subfields really, which means I constantly struggle to find time to read ML literature on all kinds of cool ML applications. Machine learning is an absolutely fascinating field of study and work.
It’s so much fun that I decided to do something that I never imagined I would ever do in life — start blogging / writing “articles” on Substack. 🔥😃🎉
All I can say is that my current intention is simply to document some of my machine learning adventures, but I do not have any specific long-term plans or any grandiose goals here. It’s just another way for me to have fun and I guess also to provide my mind with an outlet to express itself freely, which is supposed to be good for you, apparently. 🤷🏼♂️
And voilà, proceed at your own risk — I never claimed my writing was going to be either useful or entertaining, you’ve been warned! 🤣
Sincerely,
Andrew Pak