Greetings! I am Alex, and you are reading my website ～
Online, I tend to market myself as an AI / computery guy, creating and following content related to these areas. However, I have other interests and passions to tinker with – unfortunately too many to actually dedicate lots of time to all of them, with the exception of one. The One is language learning, specifically learning Chinese, which I have been generally consistent with. It has been a long road, starting in late 2018 but with large breaks and misguided routes taken along the way....
In my previous blog post, I discussed JAX – a framework for high performance numerical computing and machine learning — in an atypical manner. I didn’t create a single training loop, and only showed a couple patterns that looked vaguely machine learning-like. If you haven’t read that blog post yet, you can read it here. This approach was deliberate as I felt that JAX — although designed for machine learning research — is more general-purpose than that....
Recently, I took part in the Huggingface x Google Cloud community sprint which (despite being named a ControlNet sprint) had a very broad scope: involve diffusion models, use JAX, and use TPUs provided for free by Google Cloud. A lot of cool projects came out of it in a relatively short span of time. Our project was quite ambitious: to take my master’s dissertation work on combining step-unrolled denoising autoencoders (loosely adjacent to discrete diffusion models) with VQ-GAN, porting it all to JAX, then adding support for text-conditioned generation....
Royal York Crescent, Bristol. It has been nearly half a year since I started my first real job as a fully-fledged graduate. This has taken the form of being an AI Engineer at Graphcore, a Bristol-based AI accelerator startup. In quite a short amount of time, I have learned a great great deal and I am grateful for the opportunity and the patience of my colleagues – the latter of which is particularly needed when tutoring the average, fresh compsci graduate....
I’ve had a hankering for a while to completely redo my personal website. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, the old site was generated using my own static site generator sss. This was more of a project to learn Rust, rather to build a good static site generator. As such, it has not stood the test of time. Most notably, adding new features is truly awful and the HTML templates are part of the source code, rather than being separate and thus easily customisable....