About

Last updated: Devember 29th 2023

Hi there. I am Andrey Kurenkov – a researcher, engineer, podcaster, writer, and generally hobbyist maker and enjoyer of stuff (and more, but let’s not get too deep here).

Career-wise, I am currently a machine learning scientist at Astrocade, working to empower anyone to make video games with AI. Prior to that, I was a PhD student with the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab working at the intersection of robotics and machine learning; I was advised by Silvio Savarese and Jeannette Bohg.

This site documents much of what I have done in my life in terms of career and creative pursuits.

“I love writing. I get a kick out of sharing my thoughts with others. The act of transforming ideas into words is an amazingly efficient way to solidify and refine your thoughts about a given topic. “ -Tom Preston (creator of Jekyll), Blogging Like a Hacker

If you are so curious, I am more specifically interested in:

• AI/machine learning (increasingly, the deep kind)
• cinema (Tarkovsky, Aronofsky, Kaufman, Kurosawa, Bergman, Carruth, Kon, Miyazaki, Zvyagintsev, etc)
• robotics (particularly, intelligent robotics that can interact with humans)
• video games (mostly narrative-driven, all the indie stuff, and the Mass Effect-type stuff, and so on)
• energy/climate change (this is what led me to my EE degree)
• books (hard science fiction, modernist, some post-modernist, some pre-modernist)
• programming (especially embedded programming, but also scripting and hackathon types things as well)
• photography (doing it, as you can see on this site, but also appreciating)

Or, in visual terms: