Ben Cox

I am a computational statistician. My background is in spatio-temporal Bayesian signal processing, particle filters in particular, and the awkward business of estimating their parameters.

I did my PhD in statistics at the University of Edinburgh, and I am now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Physics, where I am loosely associated with the MADMAX and LEGEND groups. My current work is on model serialisation: developing software layers for the creation, transmission, evaluation, and long-term storage of statistical models.

This site holds my writing (rambling), my (incomplete) CV, and (a subset of) the projects I maintain.

Ask me about#

Time series modelling, probabilistic programming, particle filters, Discworld, Evangelion (the original, not the rebuilds), my on-again-off-again (currently off-again) relationship with JAX, flight simulators, or anything that you are willing to talk about for hours while I take notes.

Languages#

I primarily speak Python and Julia, though some C, C++, and Rust have managed to worm through my defences. I used to speak R, MATLAB, and Fortran, less so these days.

Human languages: native English, and German very much in progress. I can follow rather more than I can produce, and I would not claim more than that. Russian was somewhere around B1 about a decade ago, and has degenerated since.

In German, sie if you are feeling up to it, or just use my name. I am not in the habit of correcting people about this though.

Outside work#

Ballet, Russian method, which I am currently relearning.

Custom hardware, mostly things I want to exist and cannot buy:

• A medication thumper, because I do not have a working memory beyond 5 minutes.
• A divergence meter in the style of Steins;Gate, driven by a local sentiment model computing a facsimile of divergence based on news reports. LED “nixie” tubes rather than real ones, because high voltage frightens me.
• A small e-ink notetaking device.
• A shot-noise random number generator for dice rolls, built around an old Kindle Paperwhite screen, with rule sets for Call of Cthulhu, Wrath and Glory, the Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40,000 games, and of course D&D 5e.

Riflery. If you know a good club near Munich, do get in touch.

Mountaineering, which I need to get back into shape for.

Tabletop roleplaying games, where the language barrier remains an obstacle.

Ongoing side quests: Deutsch lernen, physics, and whatever machine learning projects I cook up in my spare time, trees for preference. Programming for GPUs, largely so I can tailor methods to that paradigm: branchless, fixed working memory.

Contact#

• Work: bcox@mpp.mpg.de
• Personal: bjm.cox@posteo.de

Funding#

My position is funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) within the ErUM-Data programme, under grant FKZ 05D25PC1 (DEMOS consortium).