Miscellany

Favorite books

In no particular order…

• Sean Carroll, From Eternity To Here; he also has a great blog and podcast on all thing theoretcial physics
• Richard Dawkins, namely Blind Watchmaker and God Delusion
• Cixin Liu, Dark Forest (and the full Three Body Problem series)
• George RR Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (i.e. Game of Thrones)
• Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• Steinbeck
• Orson Scott Card, Enders Game
• Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
• Safi Bahcall, Loonshots
• DFW, Infinite Jest
• Pierce Brown, Red Rising series

Favorite materials in AI & SW

On probabilistic ML:

• Ghahramani’s intro in Nature
• Roger Grosse course on flexible models of uncertainty
• Probabilistic programming intro tutorial paper and Frank Wood video
• Books: Daphne Koller’s PGMs, Chris Bishop’s Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Norvig & Russell, MacKay’s Information Theory

On software:

• Write code that is easy to delete
• Design for testability and How to test
• Books: Effective Python (and Effective C++), Clean Code and Pragmatic Programmer, Mythical Man Month
• PyCon videos are a great resource, as are all Kate Gregory talks from CppCon, and Jason Turner’s C++ weekly

Some accomplishments

• 30+ half marathons before turning 30
• With CMU Robotics and Astrobotic, I led the development of a lunar rover to 1st place $1.75M in the Google Lunar XPrize competition.
• Private pilot license
• Designed, built, and tested a custom attitude control system for flux-pinning cubesat
• Certified yoga instructor
• Captain of D1 golf team (at Cornell)
• Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science
• Bootstrapped my own AI and SW journey, starting with a few mobile robot algorithms.

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More work things

People find this helpful: Working with Alex

Beyond my main work…

Advising

Lending expertise in AI/ML and software systems:

• Germin8 Ventures
• NASA Frontier Development Lab
• (Stealth startup in next-gen compute hardware)

And informally for those who ask kindly.

Angel investing

Focus on deep-tech with fundamental advances in AI/ML and data.

I’m a FundRX investment fellow, focusing on AI-enabled and data-first healthcare technologies.

With SpaceAngels I invest in companies pursuing the next frontier to improve life here on Earth.

Other areas I’m interested in include novel compute hardware and substrates (i.e. neuromorphics) for “Software 3.0”.

Side projects

Personal: Hacking with Raspberry Pi, projects from autonomous mobile robots to a private DNS server for blocking internet ads 🤓

Consulting: Yes I can build your AI thingamajigger ➡ lavin.io/consulting