Blog

Do shorter words have longer dictionary definitions?

Language
Data Analysis
Most of the books I read are on my Kindle. One of the features of the Kindle I love is its dictionary feature. I use it frequently when I read books in other languages or in…
May 10, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

What is a derivative? Building a geometric intuition

Maths
The world around us is always changing. Cars drive along the highway, we get older, and temperatures fluctuate. Measuring the rate of change is tricky, as it always requires…
May 6, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

What is a derivative? Building a graphical intuition

Maths
But Eliott, what is a derivative?
May 2, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Radio waves, blue sky, touch screens: How LLMs can answer questions about the world around us

LLMs
Life
I have always been very curious about the world around me. I like to think that as a kid, one of the reasons I was talking so much is that there were so many things to…
Apr 25, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

A gentle introduction to prediction with Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Computers
How can we generate predictions using Machine Learning? How do basic mathematical tools allow us to make better decisions?
Apr 24, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Sophie’s World: a masterclass in teaching dry concepts

Books
Teaching
I had heard the title Sophie’s World a few times before. When a close friend recommended it to me a few weeks ago, I decided to give it a try.
Apr 23, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Learning German: From 0 to C1 in 2 years

Life
Three years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my life and moved from London to Berlin. There is one detail that I had not fully considered: German.
Apr 17, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

How to Get a Blog Up from Scratch in 1 Day Using Quarto and Netlify

Blog
Computers
Over the last two years, I avoided publishing my blog for technical reasons. I did not know how to build it, how to host it, etc. The purpose of this post is to show how…
Apr 14, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Understanding Gini Impurity in Decision Tree Learning

Machine Learning
Computers
While preparing for an introductory course on Machine Learning, I realised that I could not explain what the Gini Impurity criterion was. I understood that it measured how…
Apr 11, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

What if all words were computed equal?

Machine Learning
Life
Computers
Experiences with Data Science interviews made me realise that, to solve problems you do not know the answer to, it helps to start laying out what you already know and…
Apr 1, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

The Beauty of Sharing: More Elegant Solutions

Maths
Computers
Blog
A few months ago, for the first time in my professional life, I shared an article I had written on LinkedIn. Nothing happened.
A few weeks ago, I did it again, and I was…
Mar 30, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Book Notes: Solving Problems with Sums and Series

Maths
Computers
Books
This is a problem I found reading Elementary Real Analysis by M. Bruckner, Thomson and J. Bruckner.
Mar 11, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Double ML: Bridging the Gap Between Machine Learning and Causal Inference

Machine Learning
Computers
What will the weather be tomorrow? If I lower the price of my beer by 10%, by how much will my sales increase?
Feb 22, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Saved by Data Structures: Digging into Nearest Neighbours

Machine Learning
Computers
It was 8pm, I was sleep-deprived, and all I could hear was the roar of my Intel Core i5 CPU, without any results in sight. Little did I know that data structures would allow…
Feb 14, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Adventures with Monte Carlo Estimations

Machine Learning
Computers
What if you could solve tough problems with a list of random numbers? This article will show how Monte Carlo methods can be used to solve problems such as estimating the…
Jan 30, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Book Notes: Maximum Likelihood hides everywhere

Machine Learning
Computers
Books
As a budding Data Scientist, I long thought that I could avoid the concept of Maximum Likelihood altogether. I kept telling myself that I was just using easy-to-grasp…
Jan 24, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

The Curse of Dimensionality and its impact on Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Computers
Imagine entering an abandoned mansion. The front door leads into a room with 10 more doors. Each door you go through will lead you to a similar room with 10 additional…
Jan 14, 2025
Eliott Kalfon

Transformers: What if time-series forecasting was as easy as predicting my next …

Machine Learning
Computers
What will happen tomorrow? This is a central question of human existence. As children, we slowly learn that we are beings evolving in time. Philosophers like Heidegger argue…
Dec 10, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Adventures in Android app development using Open AI o1 in 2024

Engineering
Computers
To become a German citizen with the accelerated three-year application process, I had to take the German C1 exam (language proficiency) and the Einbürgerungstest, a kind of…
Dec 6, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Managing To Dos: What has worked so far

Life
With the new year approaching, several friends have reached out asking me how to manage “To Do’s”, or my approach to getting things done.
Dec 3, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Multi-fidelity Optimisation: The art of skimming

Algorithms
Computers
If you had 3 days to find the best book in a pile of 100 books with unknown authors and titles, how would you do it? You would not have the time to read all of them from…
Nov 10, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Black-box Optimisation: Searching in the Dark

Algorithms
Computers
The previous articles on optimisation showed that we could leverage information about optimisation problems to solve them quicker. But what if we have no or very little…
Nov 3, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Linear Programming: Optimisation at the Edges

Algorithms
Computers
In continuous optimisation problems, it is impossible to try all combinations. But what if a problem could be solved simply by evaluating the corners of the feasible region?…
Oct 19, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Useful Resources to Learn Industry Data Science and Machine Learning

Machine Learning
Computers
I started working in Data Science after studying Economics and Mathematics. Apart from a few lines of R code I copy-pasted for my master’s thesis, I had no clue about Data…
Oct 14, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Little by Little: Optimisation with analysis and gradients

Algorithms
Computers
Problems for with a known objective function or observable gradient is known can be solved efficiently through analysis or gradient descent/ascent.
Oct 12, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

The Intuition Behind Optimisation

Algorithms
Computers
What should I do with my life? What broadband internet subscription should I choose? Most of our daily problems can be framed as optimisation problems.
Oct 5, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

What is Algorithm Complexity?

Algorithms
Computers
The third lecture of the semester had just started. I was still a young lecturer full of hope and naive optimism. After 10 minutes of going through the maths of asymptotic…
Aug 31, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Chart plotting showing the upper and lower bound of a function

Big Oh, Big Omega, Big Theta: What is asymptotic notation?

Algorithms
Computers
Computer Scientists use asymptotic notation is to bind algorithmic complexity expressed as a function of its input size. Instead of focussing on a function’s exact…
Aug 31, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

What is the Complexity of Euclid’s Algorithm?

Algorithms
Computers
Euclid’s algorithm is one of the earliest algorithms ever recorded. It finds the Greatest Common Divisor or “GCD” between two integers \(a\) and \(b\) with \(a > b\). As an…
Aug 31, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

How to analyse the complexity of a Python code snippet?

Algorithms
Computers
There is a lot of theory behind algorithm analysis and complexity. But how do these concepts relate to the code you are writing every day?
Aug 31, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Smart Algorithms Use Meta-Information to Solve a Problem

Algorithms
Computers
While preparing for the introductory lecture of Algorithms and Programming, a course I was about to teach, I was struggling to find the core idea that would bind the…
Aug 31, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Reading Notes: Antifragile by Nassim Taleb

Books
What if you could separate people and ideas by their reactions to disorder? Some break, others thrive. We notice this every day around us. Some institutions collapse in…
Aug 25, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

Building a newsletter form with Quarto, Netlify and Zapier

Blog
Computers
One of the main reasons I started writing is that I love reading. Newsletters are a great way to curate content on the internet. I follow writers that I enjoy and stay up to…
Aug 17, 2024
Eliott Kalfon

From Jekyll/Github pages to Quarto: my blogging journey so far

Blog
Computers
Writing and publishing a blog has been on my mind for the last two years. As I have limited experience in web development, it took me a few tries to get to the current…
Aug 14, 2024
Eliott Kalfon
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