I'm an undergraduate student at McGill University studying physics and computer science, along with a dash of mathematics (some would say more like a heaping scoop).
My current research interests include
- probabilistic analysis, probability theory
- random discrete structures: branching processes, random graphs
- reinforcement learning theory
- quantum information theory: entanglement and negative entropy
Over my time at McGill, I have the pleasure of working with great people from several organizations such as the Society of Undergraduate Mathematics Students, McGill NeuroTech and the McGill Classical Music Club.
When I'm not watching lectures or scratching my head at QFT assignments, you can find me reading Dostoevsky, creating my next oddly specific Spotify playlist or playing piano and cursing Rachmaninov's handspan.
Contact me if you want to talk about spicy music, literature, research or anything else!
Papers
- Brandenberger, A. M., Devroye, L. and Reddad, T. The Horton-Strahler number of conditioned Galton-Watson trees. arXiv:2010.08613 [math.PR] (2020). Submitted July 2020.
- Brandenberger, A. M., Devroye, L. and Goh, M. K. Root estimation in Galton-Watson trees. arXiv:2007.05681 [math.PR] (2020). Submitted October 2020.
- Shi, R., Legrand, C. and Brandenberger, A. Toddlers track hierarchical structure dependence. Language Acquisition 27, 397–409 (2020).
- Xiong, M., Hotter, R., Nadin, D., Patel, J., Tartakovsky, S., Wang, Y., Patel, H., Axon, C., Bosiljevac, H., Brandenberger, A. et. al. A low-cost, semi-autonomous wheelchair controlled by motor imagery and jaw muscle activation. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC), 2180–2185 (2019).
For an up to date list, see my Google Scholar.
Reports
- Brandenberger, A. On the thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy. Survey paper written for COMP 480: Independent Studies in Computer Science, 18p (2020).
- Brandenberger, A., McCracken, G. Extending fluctuation dissipation relations to policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning. Project report for COMP 599: Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning, 14p (2019).
- Alama-Bronsard, Y., Brandenberger, A. On the study of the topology, geometry, and second order properties of the loss surface of deep neural networks. Project report for COMP 598: Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning (Statistical Learning Theory), 12p (2018).
Projects
- Random Trees, built in summer 2020 with Diego Lopez. Animating the free tree structures of randomly generated Galton-Watson trees of various offspring distributions.
- Fractal Graphics, building in progress with Diego Lopez. 3D mirror fractal rendered using a recusive ray tracing engine coded from scratch.
- MILO: the brain-controlled wheelchair, built in winter 2019 with McGill NeuroTechX. "Students from different backgrounds — including biology, computer science, hardware engineering, data collection, and machine learning — got together on their free-time to start a project to challenge themselves and improve the world around them. By gathering EEG bio-signals from the brain, they were able to process the data in order to direct the wheelchair forward, left, right, and stop. Over the course of the development, the students were able to create a wheelchair without using motor controls – just the control of the user’s mind – further improved with impressive semi-autonomous enhancements."
For more samples of code written at 2am, see my GitHub.
Course Notes
- COMP 252: Honours Algorithms and Data Structures. Algorithm Complexity Analysis and Divide and Conquer, written with Anton Malakhveitchouk (Prof. Luc Devroye, winter 2018). Dynamic Programming (Prof. Luc Devroye, winter 2019).
- MATH 240: Discrete Structures. Full course notes, written with Binyuan Sun (Prof. Benjamin Seamone, winter 2018).
- MATH 247: Honours Applied Linear Algebra. Full course notes, written with Daniela Breitman (Prof. Axel Hundemer, winter 2018 ).
- MATH 323: Probability Theory. Full course notes (Prof. David Stephens, fall 2018).
Drop a star on the GitHub repo if you found these notes useful