motivation. this past spring, i taught <Fundamentals of Machine Learning> for computer science seniors (with some juniors as well as seniors from other majors, including data science and economics) at NYU. last time i taught this course, the course was titled <Introduction to Machine Learning>, it was pre-ChatGPT and it was pre-pandemic; in fact, i was teaching this course in the spring of 2020, and the whole university, city and world went into its first lock down mid-way. in other words, i taught this course in the old world, and i was asked to teach this course in this brave
Category: Personal
The Irrational Decision by Recht [2026]
perhaps because my post-graduate training and career afterward has almost entirely focused on optimizing a “loss function” defined as the “average” loss of individual data instances within a large amount “data” set by “mechanistically” adjusting the parameters of a large predictor, my own thought process itself also started to resemble this process; think of an objective function, that is measurable, and figure out a systematic way to optimize this objective function. although it was not long after this started that i began to question this whole process; it probably helped that i was diagnosed with a thyroid cancer (pretty rare
Leaving Prescient Design/Genentech/Roche
(i posted it on social media yesterday and am leaving here as is for the future record. i have a lot of thoughts i want to share about my time founding Prescient Design, joining Genentech/Toche and staying there for more than four years, but i will age them a bit further and share them over a long period …) According to Statistics Korea, the remaining life expectancy of a 41-year-old Korean male is about 41 years. In other words, I’m statistically at the turning point of my life. and, at this point, i’m wrapping up one of my most memorable
MyChartExplorer: a vibe-coding journey toward accessing my own medical records
if you’ve been following me on twitter (X), linkedin, bluesky, etc., over the past few months, you may have seen me doing some random vibe coding here and there. in particular, over the past three weeks, i’ve been spending a few hours each weekend to check whether vibe-coding is real and if it’s ready for an individual, non-professional engineer to launch a web app online, from scratch without using any existing app development platform. i’m writing this blog post to list out some of the services and tools i’ve used to create a web app, to share with those who
Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics
i joined NYU as an assistant professor nearly ten years ago in Fall 2015. during that fall, Glen de Vries, who was the founder and president of Medidata, endowed a professorship in health statistics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU. this was celebrated in an event in the faculty lounge on the 13th floor of the Warren Weaver Hall. because i had a weekly lab session for my very first course at NYU almost at the same time, i sadly could not attend it myself, but it was how i learned of Glen de Vries, Medidata and their