Natalie Afonina

Deploying _safe_ autonomous driving technology to the masses | Sponsored ice climbing athlete ⛏️| I think a lot about Risk and Risk-taking

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

The American dream. Big trucks and open roads (but make it an EV)

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@nikunj Omg this is my boyfriend 😂 first thing he does when he wakes up in the morning ‘gotta check the loss curves’

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@lpolovets When I was in grad school I hung with the cybersecurity grads & one of them interned at a company doing threat intelligence & he just pulled out this massive map of all the undersea cables connecting the world & said ‘we’re lucky no one is motivated enough yet to cut these’

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

Teacher-student e2e AV model architectures are the future. Any adas/av developer not pivoting to this and still doing it the classical way will be left in the dust

[Oliver Cameron @olivercameron]

@Yuchenj_UW Your knowledge of Waymo is outdated.

https://t.co/T4Fz5Zy0Fx

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@scootykins A decently-sized mountain town (57k pop), MSU- academics/industry, major airport with direct flights 18min away. Great schools/arts/comedy/music/nature. I work in self-driving & there are tech offices here like Aurora/May Mobility/Oracle/Onyx. It’s most similar to Boulder, CO

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

AI Infra by weekday, ice climbing clinic teaching this weekend @bozemanicefest

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@chadbyers What’s your VO2 measuring methodology?

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

I’m in a tiny village in the Ennedi Desert of Chad on a climbing expedition & @Starlink connecting the world over here from a grass hut with some solar panels

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@helloitslynne I’ll often ask ‘hey, on a scale of 1-10 how much do you care about this?’ Both people blurt out an answer & really helps calibrate decision-making. Dated a vegan (lonnnng ago) & asked how much he cared that I ate meat. I was a 3, he was a 9. So I was veggie for that relationship

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@george__mack From Third World to First: The Singapore Story is an incredibly underrated book. Imagine if a government actually used data to make policy decisions and experimented till they got it right

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@brockpierson Free solo climb things I shouldn’t be climbing without a rope. The climbing equivalent of going on a bender

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

Got to meet one of my heroes recently. One thing I miss about academia is running into people who work on completely different problems than you and expand your universe

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@tferriss Because shadow daddies, strong independent female protagonist who rides dragons, magical powers, a love triangle and a Harry-Potter-esque school-based universe that’s relatable

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@agtruesdell @SrihariNaiduMD @AlisaCohn @XavierPrida @AnkurKalraMD @KoushikReddyMD There is actually a mathematical way of stating this relationship you’re stating! You can model both risk and reward using model parameters, probability distributions, time horizons (where the integrals come in) and impact (also known as loss size).

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

This is WILD. Beam-powered propulsion, as a method for powering aircraft by beaming energy to them from a remote power array. @DARPA @NASA + private industry posting lots of updates and progress. What a crazy world we live in

https://t.co/Vv5xcgLoiN

[Alex Kendall @alexgkendall]

More examples from our new 4D scene reconstruction model PRISM-1. Accurately simulating edge cases requires intricate details, such as the bus's left indicator light in the first video, or the truck's side door opening in the second video. Simulation 100% learned end-to-end.

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

Took an onion 🧅 on a tour of as many onion dome churches as I could find on my recent Moscow visit. Way more entertaining than taking standard tourist pics

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

@ryanfalor Lots and lots of practice. I recommend a large backyard and large hale bales for practice!

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

Elk I harvested from the mountains of Montana and now a meal I get to share with friends. Grateful to have the opportunity to romp in the woods and the fitness to hunt in the backcountry 🏹

[Natalie Afonina @nat_exploring]

I taste-tested some chemosynthesized butter (fat) on toast last week. Blown away. This is the future.

This paper explains the concepts for synthesizing all sorts of molecules. We’ll be seeing a lot of productionizing of this research in the next decade: https://t.co/paCI2BbXJb