All work
The full log: every project, case study, and essay — production, research, community, and writing across 28 entries. Filter to narrow the band.
Work entries
rocky_mini: A Robot's Brain, Built and Tested Without the Robot
An embodied AI character (Rocky, the Eridian engineer from Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary) built sim-first on a fully local, zero-cost stack. Every external service sits behind a Protocol with a Fake, so the whole four-latency-domain brain runs and passes 126 tests with no robot, no GPU, and no local LLM in the loop. Sim-tested; hardware bring-up pending.
Will I Hit My Target? A Monte Carlo Planner with ML Inputs
I built a portfolio planner that feeds four machine-learning models into one Monte Carlo wealth simulation, then asks a concrete question. Given a target and a contribution, what are the odds, and how much more would move them? On the synthetic dataset the median lands just short, and the interesting part is what the simulation is made of.
No Better Than a Coin Flip: Quantum Kernels on ICU Data
A reproducible quantum-versus-classical benchmark for ICU mortality prediction. Every quantum model lands on the 0.5 chance line while the classical baselines clear it, and the confidence intervals are what make the null result trustworthy.
Raising an Alien in Simulation: Building a Robot's Brain Without the Robot
I built and tested Rocky's entire software brain in simulation, without the robot, the GPU, or the local LLM in the loop. The honest sim-versus-real boundary is the point, not a caveat, and Protocols with Fakes are what let one codebase run in sim now and drive hardware later.
Representation Wins on QA, Not on ML
A paired-data study over 13,800 medication-adherence questions: narrative retrieval wins specialty-med QA, but structured FHIR features win the downstream adherence-prediction task. The representation that wins QA is not the one that wins ML.
Interventional masked-line ablation reveals shortcut learning
An interventional masked-line audit of a 0.926 macro-F1 LightGBM classifier on Gaia-ESO UVES spectra. F and G read textbook diagnostics; K reads a multi-leg shortcut, and the survey pipeline hides a second one in its continuum.
An Anxious Nomad Collective: A Weekly Substack of Book Reviews, Essays, and Long Looks at the Sky
A personal newsletter in the voice the day job does not allow. Book reviews are the entry point. The rest is poetry, personal essay, and slow science writing.
Stellar Spectra with Gradient Origin Networks
The cross-survey data-engineering layer for a Gradient Origin Network project on stellar spectra: survey-specific FITS readers, a ~30,000-star cross-match across APOGEE DR17, GALAH DR3, and Gaia-ESO DR4, and a DVC-tracked HDF5/Parquet store. The generative model itself is upstream; this is the pipeline that feeds it.
FHIR for AI/ML Engineers: What the Spec Gets Right and Where It Bites
A field guide to FHIR for the ML engineer who just received a half-broken CSV export and a tight deadline. What the standard actually solves, and what it hands you as a research problem in disguise.
From Physics PDEs to PyTorch
How knowing why a PDE oscillates helps you debug an over-fitting transformer. An essay on transferable intuition between experimental physics and ML.
Clinical Note Summarizer: MLOps for Healthcare NLP
A FLAN-T5 summarizer fine-tuned on MTS-Dialog, wrapped in a FastAPI service that degrades gracefully, behind CI/CD that authenticates to GCP via Workload Identity Federation.
QML-Essentials: 21 weeks of quantum machine learning, honestly graded
A self-paced curriculum that ended with a working quantum autoencoder, four sub-projects of head-to-head comparison against classical baselines, and a clear-eyed view of what quantum ML can and cannot do at simulator scale today.
Firebird Community Cycle
Board service for a Barrie bike co-op (2022 to 2026): grant writing, POS procurement, and a city-partnered bike-diversion program that keeps hundreds of bikes a year out of the landfill.
Tech Titans: Teaching Python and FLL robotics at Barrie Public Library
A 24-session community STEM program for ages 9 to 14. Two introductory Python coding cohorts followed by twelve sessions of FIRST LEGO League SUPERPOWERED robotics. Concluded April 2026.
OPLA Psychological Safety Survey
Designed, deployed, analysed and presented a province-wide survey of Ontario public library staff: 1,236 responses across 60+ library systems, measuring 13 psychosocial factors, presented at the OLA Super Conference.
Dismantled by Design
A data-journalism analysis of how coordinated book-banning campaigns are engineered at the policy level, not the parent level.
Roots of Reality: Volunteer Researcher and Long-Form Writer for a Big History Podcast
Source-vetted research, social-media briefs, and full-length investigative articles for a globally-ranked podcast covering history from the formation of the universe to the present. Volunteer role, since September 2025.
Debunking Denialism About Canada's Sixties Scoop Policy
Historical analysis confronting revisionist narratives about the systematic removal of Indigenous children in Canada.
Building Healthcare Software at metricHEALTH
FHIR-compliant integrations, automated test frameworks, and clinical KPI dashboards. The work that earned the team Barrie's Mayor's Award for Research and Innovation.
Summoner: A Plan-Execute-Reflect Agent Framework on GCP
An extensible multi-agent scaffold built on Vertex AI, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and Firestore. The artifact is the orchestration pattern, not the demo task.
Quantum vs Classical for ICU Mortality: A Reproducible Benchmark
Three quantum kernel feature maps, a variational quantum classifier, and a quantum neural network, run head-to-head against classical baselines on the WiDS Datathon 2020 ICU dataset. On the reproducible synthetic-fallback run, every quantum model lands on the 0.5 chance line while the classical baselines clear it and train 100x to 10,000x faster.
Star-Type Classification: A Pipeline I Trust
A six-class stellar classifier in scikit-learn, built around a clean ColumnTransformer pipeline and a reproducible CLI. The artifact is the engineering polish, not the headline accuracy.
CarePal: AI Wellness Companion for Seniors
Proactive AI companion for senior wellness checks and medication adherence. Built with the Cohere API and a retrieval-augmented LLM in 20 hours. 2nd place at the Georgian College GenAI Hackathon.
AutoML vs LSTM: Forecasting Iowa Liquor Sales
Comparative study on 19.4 million transactions. Hyperopt-sklearn AutoML reached 85 percent accuracy. An LSTM network reached 88 percent. The interesting finding was the trade-off.
Divvy Bikes: A Year in 4.3 Million Trips
Behavioral and operational analysis of the full 2023 Divvy bike-share dataset, separating member from casual riders and recommending where the operational levers are.
A Century of Natural Disasters: Trends, Impact, and Response
Analysis of global disaster records from 1900 to 2021. Droughts and epidemics, less frequent than floods and storms, killed five times as many people.
Real-Time Salary Stream: Scala, Spark Structured Streaming, Kafka, MySQL
Coursework streaming pipeline that ingests employee records over Kafka, classifies them by salary band in Spark Structured Streaming, and sinks the splits to dedicated MySQL tables and downstream Kafka topics. The whole thing runs in Docker Compose.
Neural Networks from First Principles
Backprop with a pencil before backprop in NumPy. A two-layer network for MNIST-shaped inputs, derived from the chain rule and implemented from scratch. The artifact is the math, not the accuracy.