
I (ie Alex Lang) am a physics PhD currently working for Cruise. I lead perception teams working on solving autonomous driving.
I have previously worked on a variety of research topics such as physics, computational neuroscience, machine learning and theoretical biophysics. As an outsider, that probably looks like a jumble of topics, but I swear, there is a theme! In my research, I apply techniques (both conceptual and mathematical) from statistical physics to a variety of problems. Statistical physics is the domain of physics that applies to large systems (number of “particles” when
). In many ways large systems are simpler than small systems, so taking the extremely large system size limit (
) often brings useful insights into a problem. So the blog name is inspired from statistical physics, my broad interests, and of course, Buzz Lightyear.