About

Bio

Here’s a bio about the author in the third person:

Patrick Violette (@itspviolette) is a “Full Stack” Machine Learning Engineer, Software Engineer, and a novice scientist. He’s worked at Google as a Senior Software Engineer focusing on many aspects of “Hey Google” hotword detection, a flagship, product-facing, machine learning feature for the Google Assistant. He’s now more focused on applying computing to biology.

See resume for more details.

Feel free to get in touch via twitter.com/itspviolette or LinkedIn direct message.

Blog Goals

My goal for this blog is to provide reference content and first-principles analysis around biology, computing, and machine learning, and DIY “bio-hacking.” I’ve divided the content on this site along these two categories:

• notes tend to be more factual references. Notes range from jotting down formulas and charts to more extensive/verbose information that may become dated. Notes may be “incomplete,” allowing me to capture research in progress.
• posts tend to be more high-level thinking, such as thought experiments, actual experiments, synthesis of ideas.

As a relatively new biologist, I hope that the content here can help others learn the material that I have been learning, and benefit from the “Beginner’s Mind” I have in Biology.

As a relatively experienced machine learning practitioner/data scientist, I think it’s important for machine learning practitioners to have some understanding of the domain in which they are working. The machine learning concepts presented may be more advanced, but hopefully they will also weave in enough biology that others with a machine learning background will also be able to benefit from my learning biology.