Hi. I'm Alex. I'm a generalist; I'm studying Physics at the University of Bristol, but I have a computer science background and I'm broadly curious. I'm currently participating in the Metaculus AI bot competition with a focus on improving AI forecasting research.

Before that, I worked on AI translation in my gap year, writing a blog about some of my earlier findings, making a translator based on my later ones, and building a commercial browser extension for language learning. The most interesting pattern I've found since I moved on from that project is that AI translation is barely improving - gpt-4.1 remains a core part of ensembles.

I also briefly worked on a hardware project for blind people ("Foresight") - specifically, something to give those without light perception access to it through a small, head mounted device and haptic feedback - but quickly discovered the high cost of hardware iteration. I'd like to come back to it after university, perhaps as a proper startup; foresight was intentionally designed to be a simple MVP, but there's a whole world of unimplemented ideas. If you're interested in disability tech, please email me!

I did less during my A Levels due to life circumstances, though if you're coming to this website for one of the small tools I created in that period, you may find my open-source Sophos XG login system, TLS-decryption-resistant firewall evasion system, PMT structure backup, Fusion 360 shortcuts, or Physics video archive helpful. The alternative frontend for Arbor is no longer in operation, as I didn't feel it was appropriate for me to run something handling student data once I'd left school.

Prior to that, during my early teens, I worked on internal software as part of an MMO group for the defunct game "Starbase"; I built OCR and ML-based software for live position tracking, which pulled locations from ISAN, a trilateration-based GPS system, and fed it to a web-based Starmap. I also built a data analytics system for a local business and participated in various hackathons.

If you're looking for my AI-derived lecture notes, they're available at notes.alexcj.co.uk.

Outside of technical matters, I am a spaceflight enthusiast and enjoy reading about history and politics.