Writing
Notes, announcements, and longer pieces — shared first on LinkedIn, kept here for the record.
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An AI second brain can remember everything and still be wrong
Search can recover a relevant record without knowing whether it is current, authoritative, or supported. A reliable AI second brain needs connected records, checks, and human review.
- AI Agents
- Knowledge Management
- Reproducible Research
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Can LLMs really not jump, or are we defining the jump incorrectly?
Co-Scientist and an AI-assisted graph-theory counterexample complicate the claim that LLMs cannot make abductive jumps, but neither settles how scientific novelty should be defined.
- AI for Science
- Scientific Discovery
- Philosophy of Science
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A 30-year gap in derivative-free convex optimization, closed with AI assistance and verified in Lean 4
Phillip Kerger reports a near-quadratic oracle-complexity lower bound for derivative-free convex optimization — open since Protasov's 1996 upper bound — drafted in a single 2.5-hour model session and formalized in Lean 4 with no...
- Optimization
- AI for Mathematics
- Formal Verification
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Visually convincing LLM simulations can conceal substantial differences in numerical fidelity
Five frontier models built the same 3D underwater-acoustic solver in isolation. Judged against BELLHOP3D by numerical output rather than screenshots, visually convincing simulations concealed large gaps in fidelity.
- LLM Evaluation
- Underwater Acoustics
- Computational Physics
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A university timetable can look clean on paper and still break in operation
KAIROS is a CP-SAT university timetabling engine that drove every hard-constraint category to zero across two live TED University terms — cutting within-day idle time ~75% and capacity waste ~29% per room-hour.
- Operations Research
- Constraint Programming
- University Timetabling
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Still uploading your .tex files to Overleaf's servers?
I stopped a while ago. VS Code + LaTeX Workshop + Claude Code — files on disk, version control in Git, compilation on my own machine. Overleaf still wins on real-time collaboration; local control...
- LaTeX
- Scientific Writing
- Research Workflow
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An academic rate limiter: IEEE TWC now caps authors at 36 new manuscripts a year
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications has introduced a per-author submission cap — at most 36 new manuscripts per year. Three a month. The number is high enough to be no constraint at all for...
- Academic Publishing
- Research Integrity
- Peer Review
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The hardest part of running a jury isn't the jury
Three hours of evaluation can turn into days of Excel merging, score normalization, and accreditation paperwork. VERA turns post-jury work into a structured, export-ready workflow — QR-code scoring from a phone, live rankings, and...
- Engineering Education
- Assessment
- Accreditation
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A 30,000-variable knapsack, solved on a GPU in ten seconds
NVIDIA cuOpt on a large-scale Multi-Dimensional Knapsack Problem — 30K binary variables, 10 knapsack constraints, ~300k nonzeros. Solved on a Tesla T4 under a 10-second limit to a ~0.035% relative MIP gap.
- Operations Research
- GPU Optimization
- Integer Programming
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Airport gate assignment, revisited as a multi-objective mixed-integer program
A mixed-integer formulation of the airport gate assignment problem: time-overlap constraints via slot discretization, passenger-based gate capacities derived from historic utilization, and an objective that trades remote-stand penalties against passenger load balance.
- Operations Research
- Multi-Objective Optimization
- Integer Programming