Hi, I’m Itsi
I’m an ML/AI guy from Sydney, Australia, currently living in San Francisco, USA.
Things I Work On
I have a master’s degree in statistics and operations research and started my career as a quant in high-frequency trading. Fortunately, data science and machine learning are incredibly flexible and have allowed me to follow my interests across many industries, working with a lot of great people. My work has covered building AI evals and simulation systems, developing algorithms for scientific instrumentation, architecting ML systems for wildfire prevention, building a successful social media platform, and developing optimization techniques to help make the world’s vegan cheese better.
I work in the alternative protein (vegan food) space. I ran data science at Climax Foods, where I used ML tools with food science researchers, including experimental design techniques to improve the way we formulate foods in R&D. I led our collaboration to reformulate Plant Based Mini Babybel, which took us to their research facilities and factories in France four times to work with their scientists, among other projects. I now work with the Sustainable Protein Action Lab to help propagate these ideas more widely into the industry.
I worked as an AI Engineer at CloudTrucks, leading the implementation of our flagship voice AI dispatcher product and building out the evals and driver simulation platforms to make the system functional and optimal. You can read my AI and evals design doc here for a taste of that work.
I co-founded Couchers.org, a nonprofit we created to replace Couchsurfing. It has about 50,000 users.
I am the Editor-in-Chief of VILF.org, a comprehensive vegan companion to San Francisco. I also run the VILF blog, where I occasionally post gripes and love letters to foods like why caring about food waste is dumb and the glory of Vlasic’s Pickle Balls.
I completed my thesis for a master’s degree at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of Professor Peter Taylor, focusing on developing a new machine learning method for inferring the topology of the Bitcoin P2P network—a task that has significant impact on the pseudonymity properties of the cryptocurrency.
Other Things
Music
I have played the violin for over 20 years. I play with San Francisco Civic Music and sometimes with the Awesome Orchestra and a string quartet.
I’m very into 20th-century classical music. I have taken several courses in music theory and have previously composed pieces for chamber groups. For an intro to 20th-century music, check out this playlist.
Food
I have eaten a lot, and I have a lot of opinions. I’m a big fan of cooking. I frequently organize home-cooked dinners and outings with my friends. My three favorite vegetables are eggplant, cauliflower, and cucumber.
Please check out my 🍲 Recipes.
Travel
I’ve been to a whole bunch of places! I like to collect carpets in every country I travel to. Through travel, I discovered couchsurfing, which later led me to co-founding Couchers.org.
Community Building
I host various potlucks and other vegan events with my partner Xander Balwit. We aim to grow an empire that will culminate in a vegan charter city.