About

Hi, I'm Blake.

I want to aid humanity's collective wisdom via better technology and psychotechnology.

I currently work on ML chip simulation at Google. Previously, I've been an AI Resident at Microsoft Research, and a Research Assistant at the New England Complex Systems Institute. Before that, I studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Appproach

I start with visions for our socio-technical future, then find the hard technical/quantitative questions that are needed to unlock that future.

Want to build artificial life-forms? We'll need cheap ways to synthesize long sequences of DNA. Want fluent, real-time interactions with AI? We'll need co-optimized hardware and software that can run these inferences at low latency. Want to prevent global pandemics? We'll need to rethink our economic models that inform policy response.

I take an inherently antidisciplinary approach, and have worked with diverse media ranging from bits to atoms to molecules.

Projects

Genetic D-Latch
slides

Automated DNA Assembly (Master's Thesis)
pdf | MIT DSpace

Execution-Guided Neural Program Synthesis
poster

Toski (Scheme Debugger)
code | report | blog

Hand Someone Your Heart (Interactive Art)
video | gallery | code | design

Take-Two: Using Google Glass for Augmented Memory. [video]

Human-Machine Collaboration for Fast Land Cover Mapping
AAAI 2020. Oral Presentation (top 3%).
pdf | arXiv | code | video

Image credit: wired.com - 'Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm' -- https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/

Homer: Spaced Repetition Learning. [code]

Zero Robotics competition (team founder)
Team site | code (2010) | code (2011) | video (simulation) | video (ISS run)

FIRST Robotics Competition
code (2010-2011) | code (2012) | video

3D Rendering from Scratch in C
code | gallery

Pandemic Response as Reinforcement Learning
NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Machine Learning for Economic Policy.
paper | code

Is Locking Down Worth It? (Interactive Visualization)

Lockdown: Pandemic Decision-Making Game

Should the World Stay Home for a Month?
pdf

Respiratory Health for Better COVID-19 Outcomes
pdf | web

Could Air Filtration Reduce COVID-19 Severity and Spread?
pdf | web

Writing

Intrinsic Reward, Biological Utility, and Saving the Planet
The Case for Open-Ended AI
Open-Endedness, Multi-Agent Learning and Existential Risk
Image credit: α-Rank: Multi-Agent Evaluation by Evolution -- Shayegan Omidshafiei, Christos Papadimitriou, Georgios Piliouras, Karl Tuyls, Mark Rowland, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Wojciech M. Czarnecki, Marc Lanctot, Julien Perolat, Remi Munos -- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.01373.pdfGradient Descent and Chain-Linked Systems
Image credit: [1] Vincent Dumoulin, Francesco Visin - A guide to convolution arithmetic for deep learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07285Softmax-Weighted Average Pooling
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00508Machine Learning for Program Synthesis
On Hallucinatory Intelligence
My Path to AI Residency (Microsoft Research)
Multi-Agent Cooperation via Intrinsic Motivation

What I'm Reading / Watching

Problems of Knowledge and Freedom

Design as Participation

Behavior Without Utility