About

Now

I’m Brian Burns, a machine learning PhD student at the University of Washington broadly interested in transfer learning. I’m using this website as a writing outlet - first to clarify and flesh out my own thoughts, second to share them with others.

I’m married to Martine Matejczyk, who works as a freelance industrial designer and runs Aesthetic Protocol, selling seamless, 3D-knit shirts made of baby alpaca fiber.

I’m on Twitter and you can email me at bburns0@uw.edu.

Background

I did a bunch of interesting and weird things before getting into ML:

Prior to starting the ML PhD in 2021, I started Caladan Capital, a long-only hedge fund with Samo Burja, whose investment thesis was an outgrowth and application of some of the ideas from his manuscript Great Founder Theory. We performed excellently (44-70% annualized returns depending on start/end dates), but weren’t able to raise enough money to operate the fund sustainably. I will likely return to some form of professional investing in the next few years, either via our Caladan thesis and variants of it, or starting a fund applying HFT/ML techniques to niche crypto markets.

Prior to Caladan, I worked as a researcher at Leverage Research/Paradigm Academy, a joint early-stage-science research institute and startup incubator run by Geoff Anders. On the science side I wrote manuscripts which built out and applied Connection Theory, a unified theory of human psychology that Geoff created. On the startup incubator side I assisted Reserve Protocol at their earliest stages of investor outreach, market research, and mathematical details of intial protocol design.

Prior to Leverage/Paradigm, I studied mathematics at the University of Chicago. I ~finished the major as a freshman, studied math, statistics, and ML primarily at the graduate level as a sophomore, and graduated after two years’ study.

In high school I was one of the early core team (5-10 people) that built Direct Action Everywhere from a small South Bay meetup group into a grassroots animal rights network with thousands of activists around the world. I ran the network’s press working group, mentoring dozens of chapter leaders around the world in the basics of media and PR, and personally got our investigations published in major media outlets such as the NYT, Fox News, CNN, WaPo, etc. I also studied math and mathematical physics at UC Berkeley concurrently with high school.

This website

This website is hosted via Github Pages and styled according to the open-source Jekyll framework. I’d highly recommend the system. You can read more about it here.