Welcome to my new blog! I am a master’s student at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where I study robotics. I’ve been meaning to start a blog where I can talk about my studies for a while now, mostly since there is an enormous variety of topics that I do not often get to talk about at length. My interests lie at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, and mathematics, so you can expect to hear a lot about these things. To be slightly more specific, I enjoy learning about topics in computer vision, machine learning with a focus on reinforcement learning, probabilistic modeling, control engineering, game theory, computer graphics, and finally software engineering.

One project that I worked on this summer is the Summer of Math Exposition hosted by the Youtube channel 3Blue1Brown. It was a lot of fun working on this project, trying to explain a bit of mathematics to a general audience. With the contest having come to a close and the judges being in session it will be interesting to see who this year’s winners will be. If last year’s results are anything to go by they will be great mini-lectures that a lot of people will enjoy. The video entries in this year’s competition are all public and can be enjoyed here. As a bit of shameless self-promotion, here is my own video about the Optimizer’s Curse.

My own mini-lecture combines probability theory and decision making, which come together to form a problem that is relevant to a lot of people. The short version of the story is that making decisions under uncertainty can lead to a statistical bias, i.e. systematically overestimating or underestimating something that you want to measure such as time or costs. Luckily this problem can be overcome relatively easily using a number of approaches. However, in my opinion the most important lesson to be learned from the Optimizer’s Curse is about the existence of sometimes subtle biases. While I’m not a trained statistician, I do run into situations where this specific bias is important to keep in mind, and I’m by no means an exception. Knowing you have a problem is the first step to solving it, and so I wanted to make more people aware of this bias. If you want to hear more about this I’ll let my video explain the rest :)