Yesterday I had great fun teaching hyperdimensional computing, the algebra of concepts, to biodesign students.

Learn how to build a brain:

Slides🛝: speakerdeck.com/michielstock...
Notebook🎈: kermit-ugent.github.io/HDC_tutorial/
Repo🐙: github.com/Kermit-UGent...

Slide deck finished. Looking forward to the practice session tomorrow!

A bit of work, but my hyperdimensional computing tutorial is progressing nicely!

New paper! 🚨
Is diversity and novelty the key to making machine learning open-ended, robust, and interpretable? Our latest paper reviews how #qualitydiversity algorithms can be used in the data-to-decision pipeline.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

Skin in the Game emphasizes the necessity of personal exposure to the consequences of risk. By facing an 'absorbing barrier' (potential ruin), individuals are forced into more robust behavior, allowing the system to eliminate the fragile over time and improve. (5/6)

Antifragile explores how systems respond to randomness. An antifragile entity exhibits a convex response, meaning it benefits from higher volatility (Jensen's Inequality). Example: buffers, good selection criteria.... (4/6)

The Black Swan highlights rare yet extremely impactful events. It argues the world isn't governed by 'Mediocristan' (compact Gaussian distributions), but by 'Extremistan' with fat tails – assuming we can even characterize the distribution. (3/6)

Fooled by Randomness states that a string of successes is likely due to chance, especially when some selection is involved. Randomness produces patterns, and our brains are wired to detect those. (2/6)

The Incerto books are written in a provocative style that may not appeal to everyone. Beneath the prose, each book explores a profound concept in probability theory. I tried to strip each to its bare bones. (1/6)

Small blog post on how to automate model building for mechanical systems using ModelingToolkit. #julialang

michielstock.github.io/posts/2025/p...

The KERMIT (kermit.ugent.be) research unit at @fbwugent.bsky.social focuses on holistic modeling for life sciences. In my subunit, we are particularly interested in (stochastic, differentiable, evolutionary...) computation for plants and biotechnology.

Finally, a new blog post! The Walk on Spheres algorithm is an elegant method for solving elliptic PDEs. Minimal implementation using #julialang

michielstock.github.io/posts/2025/W...

As everyone shares AI-generated images, I'll also post something I've created. I took up watercolors to relax, and my latest one I am quite happy about!

Proud to have finally finished the new syllabus of my modeling course. 😌 We cover the fundamentals of modeling with ODEs and probability. I hope the students will also like it in a couple of weeks.

I recently finished Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness". Its main thesis is that a single random draw might not look random, especially after a selection process. Such processes would be vastly different if they were repeated. In a complex world, much is beyond our control.