I am Lester Yang, a graduating MSc AI student at the University of Amsterdam. I have 3+ years of industry experience building machine learning systems and tools. Here I work through deep learning from first principles, and occasionally other things I find interesting.
Reach me at lesterpjy@gmail.com.
News
- Aug 31, 2026 I graduated cum laude from the MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam. My thesis, Posterior-Amortized Contrastive Estimation for Sequential Bayesian Experimental Design, is on sequential Bayesian experimental design in the regime where the standard objective saturates on the most informative experiments, and on a method that ranks candidate designs under saturation without a trained design policy or simulator gradients.
- Jul 18, 2026 New post on the probability that the baby in Messi’s 2007 charity photo would face him in this year’s WC final.
- Jul 10, 2026 🏆 Spiros Baxevanakis and I placed 1st at the ImageCLEF 2026 Multimodal Reasoning (Visual MCQ) competition — read about our winning solution in the pre-print.
- Jan 28, 2026 New post on how normalizing flows turn noise into data.
- Feb 26, 2024 New post on building modern transformer activations from scratch.