Isaac Reid

I’m a third-year PhD student at the Machine Learning Group within the Cambridge University Engineering Department. I am interested in problems at the interface of ML, statistical physics and applied mathematics.

Donostia, April 2024

Donostia, April 2024

I’m co-supervised by Dr Adrian Weller and Prof. Rich Turner, and collaborate closely with Prof. Krzysztof Choromanski (Google DeepMind and Columbia). I’m funded by a Trinity College external studentship and more recently a Google PhD Fellowship.

I’m currently interested in structure and randomness in machine learning. This includes structure in randomness: improving the convergence of Monte Carlo estimates by inducing carefully-engineered correlations between samples. It also includes randomness for structure: developing novel estimators for functions defined on discrete spaces like graphs. Tough theoretical questions have led us to a host of new practical algorithms, from efficient Transformers for robotics to approximate Bayesian inference on graph nodes.

I obtained my MPhys at Hertford College, Oxford, where I submitted my dissertation on entanglement barriers in dual-unitary quantum circuits, supervised by Dr Bruno Bertini and Prof. Fabian Essler. I’ve also researched simplicity bias in deep neural networks with Prof. Ard Louis at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, Oxford, and Bose-Einstein condensation in active matter with Dr Benoît Mahault and Prof. Ramin Golestanian at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organisation, Göttingen. I worked at this early-stage startup for a year, developing adaptive optics for laser fabrication of qubits inside diamonds, and currently work part-time as an associate at IQ Capital. I teach mathematics for second-year undergraduate engineers at Trinity.

Contact me at ir337(at)cam.ac.uk.

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