A Four-Dimensional Rubik's Cube
Porting an old Java applet of a 4D Rubik's cube to a modern web app with Claude Code.
Theory And Practice
Latest posts
Scalars Are All You Need for Multimodal Inference
I describe an alternate approach to multimodal inference that is structurally very different from most approaches to multimodal foundation models and offers some advantages compared to them.
Migrating with Claude
I migrated my personal website from Pelican 3.7 to Pelican 4.11 using Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic AI coding tool. Here's what changed and how it went.
Year in Review: 2025
🎉 Personal Milestones My Son graduated high school and is heading to UW–Madison to study engineering — a proud moment for both of us. My Daughter performed in two major dance performances, and she continues to impress me with her dedication and skill. Dancing my wife and I have been dancing …
Travel Map
I'm starting to work on a year in review (2025 edition). As part of that, I wanted to create a map of my travels. That turned into a little project to use claude code. I made a tool that will extract date and location from a set of photos (one …
Casseville Checkers
Cassville Checkers is a marble racing board game that has been played by my wife's family for generations. I used Claude Code to build an RL environment and web interface for the game.
The Bittersweet Lesson
In 2019, Rich Sutton authored an essay entitled “ The Bitter Lesson ”, where he made the observation that general purpose methods that leverage computation eventually win over bespoke solutions that incorporate human domain knowledge. The essay has been the source of debate and evoked both positive and negative reactions. Within the …
A pedagogical SBI example
I created this pedagogical example about simulation-based inference for a set of lectures that I gave in Paris in July 2025 for the University of Chicago's AI for Science summer school. The repository is here and it includes instructions on how to run the tutorial on your own machine. Inferring …
Yes, we did discover the Higgs!
Ben Recht got my attention with a tweet about his blog post " The Higgs discovery did not take place .” I’m generally a fan of Ben’s writing, but I think he’s off base on a number of issues, and I’ll explain why. [Updated Oct 23rd, 2024] Ben's …
Citing from a bibtex file
I've been wanting to add some semi-automated way to handle papers and bibliography information in this website. I found pelican-bibtex and pelican-cite . I'll need to look into pelican-bibtex to see if I can make a nice automated page based on a .bib file, but pelican-cite looked pretty easy to setup …
Creating a timeline
While updating this website, I considered migrating it to Sphinx based on Chris Holdgraf's blog post and my recent experience with JupyterBooks for Statistics and Data Science for Physicists . Chris has this nice timeline on his about page. I'm not ready to migrate this website away from pelican, so I …
ML4PS2020
We held the third Machine Learning for Physical Sciences workshop at NeurIPS2020 on December 11, 2020. Website: Machine Learning for Physical Sciences Some live tweets: #ML4PS2020 We had more than 150 posters and more than 200 people attend the poster session on Gather Town. Gather Town worked surprisingly well. We …
Jupyter Book
I've just started to collect material that I use for a class at NYU into a Jupyter book. It's here: https://cranmer.github.io/intro-exp-phys-book/introduction
Map of IRIS-HEP
This is a variation on the other Collaboration map aimed at IRIS-HEP. people: with description that links to their homepage. projects: specific projects or perhaps topics of discussion collaborations: groups of people brought together with some common goal, theme, or for some other organizational reason The result Making it easier …
ML4Jets 2020
We held ML4Jets at NYU January 15-17, 2020. We had about 115 in attendance.
ML4PS 2019
Our NeurIPS 2019 workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences was a big success! Check out the website: https://ml4physicalsciences.github.io Talks and videos are online: 1 2 3 4 Photos here
Launch of DS3
I took over has Executive Director of the Moore Sloan Data Science Environment (MSDSE) in late 2018. One of my major initiatives in 2019 was the launch of Data Science and Software Services (DS3 ) at NYU. The Data Science & Software Services (DS3) creates a central service for faculty and research …
RidgeMap
The other day I saw this tweet: Inspired by @ZachACole 's beautiful illustrations and @jakevdp 's pulsar plots, I just released a library to make "ridge elevation plots" with Python and @matplotlib . Let me know if you make something nice! https://t.co/X3XLnA6qAM pic.twitter.com/UfApYUDTH8 — Colin Carroll …
Map of IRIS-HEP
This is a variation on the other Collaboration map aimed at IRIS-HEP. people: with description that links to their homepage. projects: specific projects or perhaps topics of discussion collaborations: groups of people brought together with some common goal, theme, or for some other organizational reason One nice thing about this …
Scale Separation
While preparing for my talk at Gotham Phyiscs X ML I made my first word cloud pun using Andreas Mueller's word_cloud tool. Code: In [20]: import matplotlib In [21]: #!/usr/bin/env python """ Masked wordcloud ================ Using a mask you can generate wordclouds in arbitrary shapes. """ from os import path from …
INSPIRE API
For the IRIS-HEP organization we need to collect publications and update our webpage regularly. I also have to do this for our group webpage, my CV, etc. It's annoying to copy/paste all of this information. The http://inspirehep.net website lets you export bibtex, latex, and plain text for …
Murmuration
I like murmurations! Bernard Chazelle proved that if each bird adjusts its velocity and position to the other birds within a fixed radius, the time it takes to converge to a steady state tends to infinity as the number of birds increases. pic.twitter.com/Wq9iruUefl — Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary …
Year in Review: 2016
--> Despite the reputation of 2016 as a terrible year, it was pretty good for me on a personal and professional level. Many of the ideas that were born during my sabbaticall matured this year. Many of my collaborations also flourished. The 750 GeV Excess The year started with a bang …
FeedEk
I've been a bit annoyed with feed.mikle.com , the RSS feed widget I'm using on my homepage. Sometimes it doesn't update, and while it is convenient, I can't modify the code to be able to tweak it. In particular, I'd like to get mathjax to work on the titles …
Collaboration Map
This is my first attempt at a collaboration map -- it's woefully incomplete and I've largely omitted projects happening within the ATLAS collaboration. Check it out first, and then read the blog post below. The collaboration map has three components: people: center projects: left collaborations: right For a long time I've …
Reproducibility Symposium
Earlier this week I joined the Reproducibility Symposium at NYU . It was an interesting workshop/unconference with a great group of people. A huge thanks to Vicky Steeves and Juliana Freire that organized the event. Introduction and Terminology Problems It started with some nice talks by Jake VanderPlas and Katy …
Supersplit Supersymmetry and the 750 GeV Diphoton Excess
Well I caught the fever for the 750 GeV excess too. While ATLAS policies prevent me from submitting a paper to the arXiv about a preliminary result, I couldn't help but write up these thoughts on the excess in the context of Supersplit Supersymmetry. Note, they do not represent any …
My favorite way to write numbers
Warning I need to fix some css problems with pelican-bootstrap3 and embeded notebooks. You might want to view the notebook with nbviewer instead . A nice way to represent integers: Recursive Prime Decompositon ¶ Kyle Cranmer, March 2016 Recently I saw a geeky discussion about the pros and cons of different ways …
Testing interactive blog post
Recently I've been learning more about docker and all the things it can do for us. My student Lukas Heinrich has been working on the Recast project and using docker heavily. In parallel, Tim Head and I have been talking a lot about projects like binder and everware , which let …
Theorists Make Data Too
[ View the story "Theorists Make Data Too" on Storify ]
Decomposing Classification For Mixture Models
So I recently learned about the ability to convert IPython notebooks into slides using nbconvert. Not sure how I overlooked that capability of nbconvert. There are some (somewhat out of date) references on Damián Avila's blog . I'm pretty excited about the idea of using IPython notebooks as a more effective …
Open Science Meetup
After a colloquium at Renaissance Technologies and sitting on Daniel Foreman-Mackey's thesis defense I gave a fun talk for the inagural NYC Open Science Meetup sponsored by authorea . Our NYC #OpenScience meetup yesterday: @KyleCranmer showing how to detect Cosmic Rays on your smartphone pic.twitter.com/SA18UPTXvh — Authorea (@authorea) April …
Recast Progress
I'm pretty excited about the Recast reintepretation framework. The basic idea is that we want to capture the data processing pipeline associated with a search for new physics and then provide an API to it ( original paper ). This will allow scientists outside the big LHC collaborations to request that a …
Software: citation and status
I'm just finishing an intense and exciting week focusing a lot on the role of software and data in science. The big event was a workshop on Indexing Astronomical Software jointly organized by AAS and GitHub and supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It was a small workshop with …
Physics of Philae
My first storify. Some physics based on the information of the Philae's big bounce in this article [ View the story "Physics of Philae" on Storify ]
Searching for Cosmic Rays with Phones
Some news... I've joined the Crayfis collaboration. A few months ago my friend Daniel Whiteson told me about his crazy idea to use the cameras in smart phones to detect ultra high energy cosmic rays . Sure, the CMOS sensor in your cell phone is basically the same as the technology …
On Sabbatical
One of the big perks of the academic career path is sabbatical -- a year or half-year without teaching, where you often travel to a different location and often focus on some big project or perhaps a totally new subject. My path to tenure was pretty quick PhD (5 yrs), post-doc …
Hotelling's Experiment
Hotelling's Experiment ¶ License: BSD (C) 2014, Kyle Cranmer. Feel free to use, distribute, and modify with the above attribution. This is an example of "Design of Experiments" - using the statistician's terminology - given in the Wikipedia article . Aimed to be used for teaching undergraduate-level physics lab / data analysis course. **The problem …
The USA Science & Engineering Festival
I'm looking forward to presenting our LHC exhibit at the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. again this year. As part of my outreach activities, funded by the NSF I developed this exhibit. The idea was inspired by the LIGO exhibit that I saw (partially) on display at …
The Realineituhedron
Inspired by the deep insights revealed in the recent work around the Amplituhedron , a new and deeper mathematical principle has revealed itself. While the amplituhedron caused quite a buzz even outside of the world of theoretical particle physics, thus far it is restricted to \(\mathcal{N}=4\) supersymmetry. In contrast …
Using the INSPIRE API to generate AltMetric badges
I updated my Research page to include the Altmetric badges to highlight a few papers that I've been involved with that had some impact outside of high energy physics. On the side, I was wanting to try out the INSPIRE API. So I put the two together to make a …
Visualizing information geometry with multidimensional scaling
This weekend's project was a fun one! Update: Since the original post I made some more progress. I'm developing the code into my GitHub play/manifoldLearning repository. Below is from the README. I'm working on a paper about Informtion Geometry. The first step was an iPython notebook on Visualizing information …
Migrating To Pelican
So, I'm taking the leap and migrating from Wordpress to pelican . Less than year ago I switched to Wordpress from an ancient Zope site and was happy to have something that worked easily. I was very busy at the time and I guess I felt old and didn't want to …