Author: Andrew Lowry
Andrew Lowry
Andrew Lowry, a corporate professional and Senior Editor at mahdi.cheraghchi.info, is engrossed in mathematics every minute of his free time. His interests are deeply rooted in theoretical computer science, coding theory, information theory, and cryptography; he approaches these subjects as someone who genuinely cannot stop thinking about them rather than as a casual observer. He is most likely reading a proof when he is not in a meeting.
The way young researchers travel between EPFL, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Michigan is subtly impressive. It’s not an official program. There isn’t a shiny brochure with just one name on the front. However, if you spend enough time in engineering departments, you begin to see the same faces in different cities, the same advisors writing the same letters of recommendation, and the same labs exchanging talent like communities sharing tools across a fence. FieldDetailsPipeline FocusEngineering, biomedical sciences, clean energy, quantum systems, advanced manufacturingParticipating InstitutionsEPFL (Lausanne), MIT (Cambridge), CMU (Pittsburgh), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)Program Launch (U-M Pioneer…
Among Palo Alto’s machine-learning engineers, there is a somewhat awkward joke that goes around: the more impressive the model, the less anyone can explain how it truly functions. People chuckle before switching topics. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently that joke comes up in serious discussions, even when regulators are present, when observing the industry over the past few years. It was promised that eventually these systems would open up and the gears would start to turn. Rather, the gears multiplied. Hundreds of billions of parameters can be present in a modern model, layered in a way that makes it…
In a branch of theoretical computer science, the objective is to demonstrate mathematically that no one will ever be able to solve problems. Not precisely. Not roughly. Not even near. When you first hear it, it sounds almost philosophical, and the people working in this corner often discuss their findings with a mixture of awe and resignation, much like physicists discuss black holes. For almost thirty years, a field known as hardness of approximation has been subtly changing our understanding of computation. Field SnapshotDetailsField NameHardness of ApproximationParent DisciplineTheoretical Computer ScienceFoundational EraEarly 1970s, expanded sharply in the 1990sPioneering ResearchersTeofilo F. Gonzalez,…
The people who actually create translation systems began discussing their own work in a different way around 2017. Words from the previous vocabulary, such as “alignment,” “phrase tables,” and “n-grams,” started to disappear from the discussion. Another thing moved in. vectors. tensors. weights for attention. The change was subtle but genuine, and it was accompanied by a silent acknowledgement that the machines were no longer translating words by word. They were acting strangely, more like they were sensing the structure of a sentence before creating the next one. FieldDetailsSubjectThe Mathematics of Machine TranslationField of StudyComputational Linguistics, Neural Networks, Applied MathematicsCore…
It’s difficult to ignore how frequently the most significant concepts in contemporary telecom originated in an unglamorous setting. A study desk with fluorescent lighting. A partially erased whiteboard in a graduate office. The dissertation in question was written by a student who, by all accounts, only anticipated a small academic audience. However, over time, it has evolved into a resource that engineers consult when faced with a 5G problem at two in the morning. Speaking with people in the field gives me the impression that they nearly stumbled upon it. FieldDetailSubjectGraduate dissertation on coding theory and its later use in…
There’s a particular kind of academic paper that gets cited maybe forty times in a decade, sits behind a paywall most engineers never bother to climb over, and yet ends up rerouting how an entire subfield thinks about its own assumptions. The SIAM paper on fault-tolerant Pipe-PR-CG is one of those. You won’t find it trending. You won’t see it summarized on a Substack. But if you’ve spent any time around people who build the algorithms running inside weather models, MRI reconstruction pipelines, or seismic imaging stacks, the name comes up. Quietly. Almost reluctantly. Reference InformationDetailsTopic AreaNumerical Linear Algebra /…
These days, you can probably hear someone discussing their therapist if you walk into any coffee shop in Austin or Brooklyn. If you don’t lean a little closer, you might miss the fact that the therapist in question is faceless. It has a logo. Usually a gentle pastel one. It also resides within a phone. For years, the American mental health system has been quietly collapsing.Waitlists, insurance runarounds, and therapists who won’t be accepting new clients until next spring are all familiar to anyone who has attempted to schedule a session. InformationDetailsTopicAI in Mental Health Care, U.S. Crisis ResponseEstimated U.S.…
The first thing you notice when you stroll through the lengthy hallways of MIT’s Stata Center in the late afternoon is how quiet it is. Everywhere you look are whiteboards that have been partially erased and covered in a type of notation that is difficult to translate to a pitch deck. A graduate student is quietly debating a proof with someone while eating a sandwich on the floor outside an office. Valuations are not mentioned. Series B rounds are never mentioned. An engineer may be shipping a model trained on a cluster the size of a small town from Mountain…
When someone acknowledges that they don’t completely trust the model they just built, a certain kind of silence falls in the room. The quiet is louder than any conference keynote when I sit in those rooms, which are typically small academic seminars. Scientists studying climate change are familiar with their formulas. They have dedicated their careers to statistical downscaling, Navier-Stokes, and partial differential equations. Then, in 2022 or so, the topic of discussion changed. ChatGPT took place. The term “transformative” began to be used by investors in inappropriate contexts. All of a sudden, those performing the meticulous, slow math started…
The highlighted shelf bins and floating arrows aren’t the most bizarre features when you first enter a contemporary distribution center wearing AR smart glasses. After ten minutes or so, it’s how commonplace everything seems. Nothing changes, including the hum of the warehouse, the sound of forklifts reversing, and the smell of cardboard dust. The employee’s gaze shifts. Eyes remain open. Hands remain free. Additionally, a tiny green box on the periphery of their vision indicates which pallet they should proceed to next. InformationDetailsTopicAugmented Reality in Enterprise WarehousingIndustryLogistics, Supply Chain & Smart ManufacturingCore TechnologyAR Smart Glasses, Spatial Computing, Vision PickingKey PlatformsMicrosoft…