Hi, I'm Michael. I work at Palantir Technologies, and have also worked for the Chief Scientist for Australia. (Anything I write online represents my own view.) I've studied robotics and physics at the University of Sydney, and am interested in how countries and companies manage emerging technologies for societal and economic gain.
Projects
180 Degrees Consulting, a global student consultancy that works with socially conscious organizations to help improve their operations; I'm the Chief Information Officer
The New Scientist Prize, a university science writing prize I founded
Munworks, my software for Model UN conferences, with profits donated to UN agencies
Writing
- Myriads of Tiny Architects, my blog on innovation and society
- Benchmarking Australian Scientific Performance, an occasional paper for the Office of the Chief Scientist. It distils a large amount of data on citations of scientific publications to compare Australia's research effort to some similar countries. This work was also presented to the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council and the Australian Public Service's Policy Visualisation Network.
- STEM Education and the Workplace, an occasional paper for the Office of the Chief Scientist. It discusses the value of skills developed through science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, and how they are applicable to a range of careers outside academic research.
- Why study science? This essay won SydneyTalent's "Science vs. Arts" competition, and was then printed by The Australian newspaper.
- When Geneva meets genetics, on the emerging field of science diplomacy and some avenues for Australian participation. This was published in The Sydney Globalist, an undergraduate international affairs magazine at Sydney University, where it was named best article in the issue.
- The fabric of humanity. This piece won the Yale-based Global21 Foundation's international competition asking students to imagine life in 2021.
- A binary world: China, the United States, and digital oceans, on the future of their relationship as technology changes the way trade is conducted. This article was published in Perspective, the national journal of the UN Youth Association of Australia.
- A sunburnt country, on solar research in Australia, also published in The Sydney Globalist.
- My Engineering Honours thesis on self-reconfiguring robotics, a technology with huge potential.
- My Science Honours thesis, on how physics education affects scientific literacy.
- A self-targeting missile system using computer vision, one of my final year robotics projects
Visualisations
- MaKey Colour Mixer - a simple Makey Makey interface to investigate the RGBA colour space
- Tennis paths to victory - the importance of winning each set of a tennis match
- Networks - experiments with network graph layouts
- Treemaps - treemaps for research budgets
- Game of Phones - using the fictional world of Game of Thrones to illustrate Apple's real-world profits
- Pouring maps - a simpler version of cartograms for showing distributions on maps
- Research spending ranks - which nations are investing in the future?
