The personal homepage of Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck, professor of machine learning at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Interested in, among other things, geometric deep learning, topological deep learning, topological machine learning.
Visit bastian.rieck.me → On Hacker News Apr 2019 – Apr 2026
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Upon re-reading Mathematical Apocrypha , a collection of tales dealing with great mathematicians as well as their quirks and foibles, I thought about my own interactions with some of The Elders of Mathematics (from here on abbreviated as THEM) and what I would add to such a book. While I have a few interesting and…
If you and I ever had a longer conversation, chances are that Neal Stephenson might have come up once or twice. As contemporary authors go, Neal’s books are by far the most enthralling on my long and ever-growing reading list. This post is primarily written for people that usually shy away from reading what they…
In machine learning, the term manifold is thrown around a lot—in fact, there’s even a branch of machine learning dealing with learning the structure of manifolds. Said branch is aptly named manifold learning . Inspired by fantastic visualizations of shapelet mining algorithms , this post aims to give a visual…
Having recently had the pleasure of doing most of my internet interactions on a tablet or a smartphone because my laptop was ‘hors de combat,’ I was able to further reflect on the state of the modern web. 1 With Web 2.0 being already passé, Web 3.0 being not the latest fad any more, and talks of Web 4.0, 4.5, and 5.0…
One of the unexpected 1 outcomes of the Russian invasion in Ukraine is a large increase in nefarious access attempts to servers under my control, not necessarily appearing to arise from Russian IP addresses. There are the usual attempts at brute-forcing SSH access, for instance, but also a flurry of malevolent HTTP(S)…
As a reaction to the previous article on how to write a scientific paper, I got some reactions from friends and colleagues, the underlying message being that they would rather like to understand why writing can be important. There is indeed a tendency to see academic writing as a tedious task that one should try to…
Since it’s application season again, I thought that I would share some things that you are ‘allowed’ to do in academia but may not be aware of. This post is inspired by Milan Cvitkovic’s post on ‘Things you’re allowed to do’ and Veronika Cheplygina’s posts on advice for Ph.D. students, in particular her post ‘7 things…
Being an academic, I am (sort of) being paid 1 to come up with new ideas about my research field, potential applications, and the future. When I was just starting out, one of my fears was that I would not be able to come up with sufficiently good ideas. All my professors had these great ideas—would I ever be at their…
Being on the lookout for recruiting new students for my new research group , I wanted to distil some of my observations into textual form. This post deals with my impression that academia is doing a disservice to ‘T-shaped persons,’ i.e. persons combining deep expertise in one or more fields with an ability to…
Developing ideas is the central aspect of many professions, including—but certainly not limited to—academic research and software development. It is my impression that we often consider ideas, or creativity in general, to be some magical binary property: you either have ideas and are a creative mastermind, or not. The…
You may already be aware of John Baez’s “Crackpot Index” , which provides a simple tongue-in-cheek scoring system for assessing whether a research contribution to physics is likely “revolutionary.” The list contain such gems as “40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is…
In a previous article , I already introduced manifolds and their, ahem, manifold ways. Among the many interesting comments I received about this article, some were dealing with a basic question, namely how to measure the properties of a manifold. In this article, I want to present a few concepts from Morse theory …
With this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) being over, it is time to have another instalment of this series. Similar to last year’s post , I shall cover several papers that caught my attention because of their use of topological concepts—however, unlike last year, I shall not restrict the…