Data Science
I'm very interested in data science. Data science is the understanding and practice of getting knowledge out of data. For example, given data on people's Netflix viewing behaviour, can we predict what they might think of films they haven't seen? Can we predict people's personality types from their "likes" on Facebook? Machine learning and artificial intelligence are key tools in data science.At the moment I mainly use the R programming language for data science. Here are my profiles on Kaggle and Github.
Some projects
This is a project I'm working on at the moment, to compete in a Kaggle competition to predict what users of the Instacart service will buy based on their previous orders. The dataset includes 3.4 million orders from about 200,000 distinct users.In this project I used random forests to try classifying pictures of cervixes based on how many pixels there were of certain colours, for a competition on Kaggle.
In this project (coursework for the Practical Machine Learning module on Coursera) I used used data from a scientific experiment to evaluate weightlifting movements using motion sensors.
Theoretical Physics
I'm a post-doc working on superstring theory with the String Theory Group at the Università degli Studi di Torino (University of Turin) in Italy. My research is focused on perturbative superstring theory and its relationship to quantum field theory; I've written about my research in more detail here. These are the slides I used for a November 2014 talk I gave at Torino called Multi-loop string amplitudes and Feynman GraphsIn 2014 I finished my Ph.D. in the Centre for Research in String Theory at Queen Mary University of London. You can download my thesis: Gauge theory effective actions from open strings.
If you'd like to find out what string theory is, you could spend a few hours watching Brian Greene's three-part Nova documentary "The Elegant Universe" on YouTube: Part 1, part 2, part 3.
For something a lot more in-depth, have a look at my collection of string theory lecture notes on the Web.
Me on the web
My publications on INSPIRE are here. My Academia.edu page is here, and this is my LinkedIn profile. Here I am on ResearchGate. You can also follow me on Twitter.You can contact me at playle "at" to.infn.it.
