brain of mat kelcey...

after 2,350 days in america we are moving home...

as crazy as it might sound, careerwise at least, i'm leaving google brain and we're moving back to australia. #sadPandaKangaroo. it's been a super fun 6 years in the US but our move was never going to be permanent and it feels like now is the right time for the family. believe me it's hard to leave a joint google brain / X robotics project involving deep reinforcement learning robots. hard i say!

where will we be going? back to melbourne where we lived for the 6 years prior to coming here. we're keen to try something different so we've bought a farm about an hour out of the city. my wife and i both grew up in semi rural settings so we have some idea of what to expect. our kids are excited their backyard is about to grow by a factor of x250.

what will i be doing? i actually have no idea. i'm a pretty applied person, as opposed to a hardcore researcher, and have experience in a range of areas so my resume looks ok ( even if my linkedin avatar is the i-have-no-idea-what-im-doing-dog ) some recent robotics experience + lots of machine learning + moving to a farm might result in some interesting ideas. remote work is also a strong possibility; i think there is value i could add to a number of US companies even from across the ocean. to be honest i haven't thought about it too much yet, want to focus on getting everyone home as smoothly as possible first.

what's the tech scene like in melbourne? seemed fun when i was there, lots of smart people and i think interest in machine learning has only been growing. the tech talk i did at our little data science group just before moving here was half a dozen people, the tech talk i did in melbourne about 1 year ago was hundreds of people. when i did neural networks at uni in the late 90s it was embarrassing for the next 10 years to talk about it but these days it seems everyone is wanting to use them in some form.

we have about 7 weeks before we leave the bay area so i hope i get to catch up with everyone before we go! beers in the city sometime soon!