I'm Ken.
A Scottish-born data scientist with a Ph.D. in AI, living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with my partner Neeharika, a dog, four cats and a small flock of chickens. By day I'm a Senior Data Scientist at Rocket Mortgage. By night I am a visiting fellow at the University of Stirling, and I'm also taking an MA in Organizational Leadership. The rest of the time I read, take photographs, play guitar and build things like this website.
Here for the professional side? See my papers and projects.
- Books read
- 600+
- Photographs
- 500+
- Blog posts
- 72
- Words written
- 174K
- Songs played
- 50K
- Citations
- 185
The household
Brutey, the brindle pup I brought over from Scotland, four cats and a small flock of chickens. Most of my photography ends up being of them.
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Brutey
Kwee
Chaos
Yoyo
Nila
The flock
From Stirling to Ann Arbor
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Where I grew up
A small town in Scotland, which gave me my directness, my dry sense of humour and a love of hills and the cold.
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2009–2013
BSc (Hons) in Computer Science, on a campus with a loch in the middle and a castle up the road.
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2013–2015, Erskine
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, in a small town just outside Glasgow. A mistaken email sent me to Trento to photograph a conference, and being unhappy at work turned a Ph.D. from "one day" into a plan.
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2015–2019, Stirling
Metaheuristics for real-world employee rostering: teaching computers to build workable shift patterns. Stirling will always be a home.
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Michigan State University, East Lansing
A postdoc applying AI to genomics, satellite imagery, evolution and video games. I had never driven an automatic, or on the right.
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Ann Arbor
Data scientist at the University of Michigan, right at the start of the generative AI boom.
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Ann Arbor, and home
Senior Data Scientist at Rocket Mortgage, working on a master's in Organizational Leadership on the side. Michigan has been home long enough to feel like it.
Now
From the weekly refresh of 28 September 2026.
- Reading
- A Boy and His Dog by Harlan Ellison, and Vicious by V.E. Schwab
- Listening
- Is This It by The Strokes, my most played album of the last three months
- Writing
- Sleep Science, the first part of Wellness From the Science
- Learning
- A master's in Organizational Leadership, and Tamil, at a rate of roughly one word a month
Mind what's mine, then look outward
I'm a Stoic in the everyday sense more than the marble-bust one. Epictetus is a favourite: a man born into slavery who worked out the one thing nobody could take from him, his own judgement and what he chose to do next. Most of what happens to me is out of my hands. My effort, my attention and how I treat people are not.
If you read one thing on it, make it The Enchiridion by Epictetus.
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What's in my control
My effort, my judgements and what I do next. I try to spend my energy there and let the rest go, which is much easier to write than to do.
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Spending it on other people
Not fighting what I can't change leaves room for the people in front of me. I would rather assume someone is having a hard day than that they are a bad person, and ask what would help.
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In the work
It's why this site is built accessibility first, why I write about how we use AI rather than whether it is good or bad, and why I ask who a system leaves out before who it serves.
Have a poke around
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Algorithms, Live
Ten algorithms running in your browser, with the sliders to break them on purpose.
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Research, Live
The papers I wrote, each one running on a canvas you can interfere with.
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The photo map
My photographs pinned where they were taken, from Inverness to Colorado.
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This website
Hand-built HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework, and a series on how it works. The colophon measures it.
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Every book I've read
A wall of 600+ covers, searchable, with a wall of quotes beside it.
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Research papers
Optimisation, genetic programming and machine learning, from rostering to compilers to genomics.
Everything else
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've been tracking my listening on Last.fm since 2014, and the top artists are a mess: Ludovico Einaudi, Alkaline Trio, Jeremy Soule, Rammstein. Make of that what you will.
Listening stats →Reading
I spend a lot of time reading, be it audiobooks or physical. I read awful LitRPG, classic Sci Fi and Fantasy, classics, social justice, and non-fiction, and also practically anything recommended to me.
Reading log → All 600+ books → Quote wall →Cooking
I'm vegan and I cook with a mix of South Asian and Scottish influence: lots of dals, soups, stews and kale salads. I batch-cook most things, so I can eat well without spending every day in the kitchen. Except when I burn things, then I have to eat it for a week.
Homelab
A self-hosted media setup I call KenPlex: Plex plus about 20 Dockerized services for automation, transcoding, metadata and monitoring, and a music library of around 230,000 tracks. Plus scripts for things that probably didn't need automating but were fun to build.
GitHub →Blogging
I write a lot: data science, books, photography, music, moving countries, and whatever else I'm thinking through. Writing is how I find out whether I understand something.
The blog → Newsletter →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."
Writing 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.