← Jacob Davies Projects

Blog

Anyone who's worked with me knows the written word is not my strong point. Please enjoy the ideas presented here.

Ribbon rendering of green fluorescent protein's barrel, coloured from the first residue to the last

Structure targets for small protein language models

Eleven 7.4M-parameter protein encoders, identical except for the pretraining target, compared on secondary structure and fold retrieval. Regressing frozen ESM-IF1 structure embeddings with a linear head beat masked language modelling; predicting the same targets through a JEPA-style predictor did not.

Warming stripes for London from 1940 to 2025, one stripe per year, blue for cooler years and red for warmer ones

I want snow on my birthday

It's more likely to snow in the UK at Easter than at Christmas, but I've never seen snow anywhere near my birthday at the start of April. I'd heard the statistics, but I don't think I had ever properly internalised what they actually meant. This interactive project allows you to understand what the climate should be like on any given day.

Two Planet Labs Dove satellites drifting away from the International Space Station after release, with Earth below (NASA photo, public domain)

Satellite-based edge-deployed AI

Satellites can see far more of the world than they can transmit home, but with how versatile modern image processing AI can be, it has become possible to deploy a general AI model and allow end users to reduce the data they are paying for by running experiments on the satellite and only transmitting the results.

A coronal brain MRI with a bright meningioma at the top, next to a CNN Grad-CAM heatmap with a broad red area over the tumour and a ViT attention map with a tight red patch on it

Show me where the tumour is

Brain tumour classifiers are already accurate, but none can yet prove it is accurate enough to trust as a black box, so I compared models on how well they explain their answers.

Satellite view of Earth's atmosphere

Writing the missing manual for AI weather forecasts

Machine learning has caught up with physics-based weather forecasting, but the weather services lack information on how to make this transition. For my undergraduate dissertation I conducted an empirical investigation on how best to develop future MLWP models.