Published: 26th January 2023
Making complex research accessible to a general audience is one of the most useful skills a doctoral researcher can develop. MINDS student Elliot Stein put that skill to work during and after his internship at Embecosm in summer 2022.
During his three-month placement, Elliot wrote a public-facing article explaining Dynamic Causal Modelling, a mathematical technique used to analyse how different parts of a system influence each other over time. His article covers how the method works, how it can be optimised using Variational Laplace and Bayesian Model Selection, and how these approaches can be applied to solve dynamical systems problems.
The article is published on Medium, where it is freely accessible to anyone curious about the field, regardless of their technical background. It is a strong example of a MINDS researcher taking their doctoral work beyond the lab and communicating it in a way that is genuinely useful to a wider audience.
Elliot completed his internship as part of the MINDS CDT programme, which embeds industry experience into doctoral training. Embecosm is a specialist open source compiler and chip design company, and the placement gave Elliot direct exposure to how AI and machine learning techniques are applied in a commercial engineering context.