Large language models for health.

Jaan Altosaar, smiling in a floral shirt against blurred greenery.

Data Science and & machine learning for health care.

Get in touch if you want to discuss an idea or grab a coffee. I'm available; let's bring it off.

Articles

Tutorial - What is a variational autoencoder?

Deep learning and probability describe the same model in two different vocabularies. This walks through both — encoder and decoder, then inference and likelihood — until the translation is obvious.

How does physics connect to machine learning?

A lattice of magnets, solved twice: once with physics intuition, once with the variational principle. The second route is the one that scales to modern inference.

food2vec - Augmented cooking with machine intelligence

What happens when you train word embeddings on recipes instead of sentences. Ingredients that cook well together end up near each other — explore the map and see which cuisines overlap.

  • A woman holds a young girl close under a leafy tree, the girl clutching a Minnie Mouse doll and looking straight at the camera while the woman looks down at her, smiling.
  • A woman with long grey-blonde hair smiles broadly on a city street at dusk, out-of-focus traffic lights blooming red and green behind her.
  • A woman with windblown platinum hair on a rooftop, the Manhattan skyline soft and blue behind her.
  • A man in a bike helmet and oversized sunglasses sits on the pavement beside a Citi Bike, sipping from a hot-pink tumbler and holding an open book about machine learning.
  • A woman with a natural afro stands on the Williamsburg Bridge walkway, its red railings receding behind her.
  • A woman with dark hair and a nose ring smiles gently in a park, greenery and a brick building blurred behind her.
  • A woman's face framed by a dense tangle of green branches, one eye catching the light as she smiles through the foliage.
  • A man with a top knot and beaded earrings laughs as he lifts a purple road bike by its frame, a harbour and moored boats behind him in low golden light.
  • A smiling woman with short dark hair stands in front of a man in a navy jacket who looks down at her, open water and a distant shoreline behind them.
  • A man in teal-rimmed sunglasses drinks through a straw from a tumbler of ice, the bar behind him falling away into warm blur.
  • An older woman in a quilted cap and denim jacket turns toward the camera with a warm, crinkled smile.
  • An older man in a checked shirt and a YOLO snapback with a "Knowledge is Power" pin looks directly at the camera, a city street soft behind him.
  • An older woman with a shock of white hair and a green top gives a small, closed-mouth smile on a residential street.
  • Two women lean cheek to cheek at an outdoor evening event, formally dressed, other guests blurred behind them.
  • A man in a navy jacket smiles off to one side, a lake and dark trees soft in the background.
  • A man in a patterned headwrap, sunglasses and feathered wings presses his palms together in greeting behind a yellow scooter strung with sunflowers and LED lights on a wet night street.