condensed version
For an executive summary, my current resume clocks in at five pages.
me
My name is Kyle Woodward. I'm a 40-year-old resident of San Francisco, currently a Machine Learning Scientist and Auction Economist at Apple and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco. I got my Ph.D. in Economics at UCLA in 2015; my undergraduate work was at Stanford University, to which I owe degrees in math, economics, and computer science. I am an active supporter of bicycle commuting. I spend my spare time making things like websites, furniture, beer, and economic models.
Dropping me a line is left as an exercise for the reader. (tip: Google can help if you remember calculus; Wolfram|Alpha can help if you don't)
the site
The color scheme comes from The New St. Martin's Handbook, with slight adjustments to match my almae matres and former employer. And wood, or perhaps a healthy brown ale. Kudos to the publishers for picking a naturally appealing palette.
The splash page design can vary. You are encouraged to press [Esc], or double-tap, and play around. Available themes include:
- agentbased, a simulation of two populations playing a game. Selection is by simple truncation and reproduction is naively asexual. It's a dynamic recration of my old Gravatar icon, as long as you parameterize it right. If the “Speed Racer” effect is too much, you can try it as a histogram.Incompatible with your browser.
- fractal, a live rendering of a process finding the zeros of a complex function (labeled below), and you can play along with your cursor. The zeros move predictably and linearly, although this can be altered to boids-type rules. The concept caught my interest while I was reading an entertaining and thoroughly fascinating article by Simon Tatham on Fractals derived from Newton-Raphson iteration. Browsers with Javascript disabled see a pre-rendered non-interactive version of this theme.Incompatible with your browser.
- neuralnet, a live rendering of a neural network attempting to predict your cursor position in the next few fractions of a second. Node position is determined by a force-directed layout algorithm, and the perspective rotates to ensure you can see each piece of the network. Node activation is depicted by color, ranging from black (inactive) to yellow (highly-active).Incompatible with your browser.
- popsquares, a grid of squares, randomly colored and peacefully darkening and lightening for no good reason; the inspiration is almost certainly PopSquares, which has been translated into a decent Android wallpaper. Technically the color changes represent the motion of an undamped spring, but the choice of kinematics is purely aesthetic.Incompatible with your browser.
- solar, a simluation of a planetary system, to see if a simple dynamical system can generate Trojans. It would be difficult to simulate planet formation from a dust cloud in a browser window, so the simulation starts with a handful of bodies orbiting in the same plane. The bodies interact and occasionally merge, and if your starting conditions are favorable moons will be captured (moon formation via impactor is not possible in the simulation). Perspective of the system is controlled through the terminal.Incompatible with your browser.
- tesseract, a six-dimensional hypercube, rotating slowly and projected onto the screen. If you'd rather hew to the theme's name, you can render a tesseract instead.Incompatible with your browser.
- woodwardhall, pretty self-explanatory once you've seen it. This has been — and continues to be — an easter egg for appropriately-sized browser windows, and has been updated to work more generally. Photo credit goes to David Ovadia, though this is missing from his official bio. Full disclosure: Woodward Hall has absolutely no affiliation with this particular Woodward.Incompatible with your browser.
The banner images are window decoration, generated by biased Brownian motion. A particle starts at the far left, in the middle, and wanders rightward uniformly over distances and within a particular cone. The algorithm is fairly simple and exists in the source of this very page as a sequence of Logo commands passed through Logo-to-JS conversion.
The banner images are window decoration, a grid of squares slowly shifting colors. It's (more or less) the popsquares theme from the homepage, adjusted to match page colors.
Some time ago the banner images were a dynamic mow-the-lawn simulation in which each new visitor mowed a patch of a tiny yard. A fun, networked idea, but it turns out that traffic on this site is too low to sustain anything other than weedy overgrowth. This offended my basic need for order, and jiggering the parameters felt like cheating. Brownian motion it is, then.