I am Jony Hudson. I am a scientist who specialises in using computers to do interesting things.
Measured the shape of the electron. We want to know whether the electron is round, and ultimately, why the universe hasn’t yet annihilated itself. This involved custom-building a machine that could examine the wiggling motion of molecules in unprecedented detail. It also involved building computer systems to collect and analyse enormous amounts of data, looking for tiny effects on the edge of statistical significance, and rejecting many other spurious tiny effects. You can find our latest results here, and my favourite popular discussion of the work here.
Built Gorilla REPL. Gorilla REPL is a notebook-style programming environment for the Clojure programming language. It is used by thousands of scientists, data scientists, and programmers to experiment with, analyse, and build stories around their data.
Taught computers to automatically learn laws of physics. Do we need humans to do physics? Or can we use techniques from artificial intelligence to write algorithms that do it automatically? We’ve started to try and answer this question by building an algorithm that can learn the laws of physics of a classical system just by looking at raw data of the system’s movements.
Worked on building an artificial general intelligence. There’s something really interesting about the question of whether a machine could show the sort of intelligence a human does: both for what it would say about machines, and what it would say about humans. It’s a great research effort as well, covering the spectrum of work from the very mundane to the completely mind-bending. I’ve been fortunate to be able to work with some great colleagues on this at DeepMind.
Designed, built and sold openaltimeter. openaltimeter is an on-board logging altimeter for model gliders and an application to allow flyers to analyse their flights. It is an open-source hardware and software project. The altimeter hardware is Arduino compatible for easy hacking. I used to build and sell the hardware when I had time. Now, through the brilliance of open-source hardware, you can buy them from several independent vendors worldwide.
Been introduced to more than 100 million people as a “world expert on roundness”. I’ve been lucky enough as a scientist to do some pretty fun TV and radio appearances to communicate the excitement of science. But the best was definitely being featured in a madcap BBC World Service documentary on the cultural significance of round things.
Worked for one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. I learned a lot working for a hedge fund. Most of all, I value the chance that I had to learn how some of the world’s financial systems actually work. It’s really interesting. And somewhat terrifying.
Taught a short course in Mathematica. I’ve run many courses over the years, but this is the one I’m most proud of. You can find it here. It’s aimed at physicists, but a large fraction of it is suitable for all. It’s one of the few free substantial Mathematica courses on the web. It’s also one of the few resources I know of that actually digs in to how Mathematica works, and how to use it gracefully.
I think fairness and equality are very important. I think it’s more important to be respectful than correct. I try to take everyone I meet seriously. I behave as un-seriously as I can get away with. I enjoy cycling, flying model gliders, and cultivating an encyclopaedic knowledge of computer programming languages as hobbies.
Feel free to get in touch. I always like meeting new people, and love talking about science, computers, statistics, data, AI, and pretty much anything else.
You can find code on my Github page https://github.com/JonyEpsilon.
I have a linkedin profile http://uk.linkedin.com/in/JonyEpsilon.
I have a Google scholar profile.
You can email me at website at this domain.