The Rest of Me
I'm Ken, a Scottish-born data scientist with a Ph.D. in AI, now living in the United States. My research background is in niche areas of artificial intelligence, and I care deeply about ethical AI and environmental sustainability in computing. If you're here for the professional side, head over to Data Science. This page is everything else.
A Short Timeline
- 2009–2013 BSc (Hons) Computer Science.
- 2015–2019 Ph.D. in a niche corner of artificial intelligence at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
- Then Postdocs applying AI to genomics, satellite imagery, evolution, and video games.
- Across the pond Moved from Scotland to Michigan; data scientist at the University of Michigan right at the start of the GenAI boom.
- Now Senior Data Scientist at Rocket Mortgage, working on a master's in Organizational Leadership on the side.
Pets
The household includes Brutey, a brindle pup I brought over from Scotland, four cats (Kwee, Chaos, Yoyo, and Nila), plus a small flock of chickens. They're not pets, really; they're family. Most of my photography ends up being of them, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Brutey 🐕
Kwee
Chaos
Yoyo
Nila
The Flock 🐔
Hobbies & Interests
Music
I've played guitar since I was about 11, though I still can't tell you what key I'm in. These days it's mostly fingerstyle, learning covers from players like Andy McKee and Antoine Dufour. I'd like to start writing my own music at some point. I've also been tracking my listening on Last.fm since 2014. The top artists are a mess: Ludovico Einaudi, Alkaline Trio, Jeremy Soule, Rammstein. Make of that what you will.
Listening stats →Language
I'm learning Tamil. Theoretically. At my current rate of roughly one word per month, the more accurate phrasing is “I want to learn Tamil.”
Cooking
I'm vegan and I cook with a mix of South Asian and Scottish influence. Lots of dals, soups, stews, kale salads. I batch-cook most things and enjoy healthy, tasty and batch-able meals most of all. That way I can enjoy good food without spending every day in the kitchen. Except when I burn things then I have to eat it for a week.
Writing
I write fiction, very passively. I have many ideas written down and a few chapters of different stories. I'm not sure where I want to go with it yet, but I like writing.
Homelab & Tech
I run a self-hosted media setup I call KenPlex: Plex plus about 20 Dockerized services handling automation, transcoding, metadata, and monitoring. The music library alone is around 230,000 tracks, managed with beets and Mp3tag. I've written PowerShell and Python scripts for bulk audiobook conversion to .m4b, automated cover art lookups, and various other things that probably didn't need automating but were fun to build. More of my projects are on GitHub.
Blogging
I write a lot: data science, books, photography, music, moving countries, and whatever else I'm currently thinking through. Writing is how I find out whether I actually understand something, and the posts that survive that test end up here. If you'd rather have new posts arrive by themselves, there's a free email newsletter too.
