Ryan Cotsakis. Mathematician

Nice, France

About Me

I'm an extroverted, intuitive thinker who values science, nature, music, and love above all things. I grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and graduated from a degree in Engineering Physics at the University of British Columbia in 2019. In 2021 I obtained a Master's degree in Mathematics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Now I'm completing my Ph.D. at the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice, France. I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to run a marathon, publish several academic articles, and travel around the world working with extraordinary people.

Mission Statement

• Maintain a healthy mind and body - prioritize self care
• Build strong, healthy relationships with the people who matter
• Live in harmony with society
• Embrace my curiosity and seek out new learning opportunities
• Enjoy

Music

Music is a really big part of my life. For me, it is without question the art form that is most interesting and inspiring. I have compiled a list of my favourite albums sorted by year of release. You can learn a lot about me - and maybe discover some new music - by checking out my playlist linked to below.

Ph.D. in mathematics

Université Côte d'Azur

Since May, 2021, I have been in Nice, France working on a Ph.D. in mathematics in the Laboratoire J.A. Dieudonné. My research relates statistics and computational geometry. Specifically, I use tools from stochastic geometry to explore extreme spatio-temporal dependence in high-resolution gridded data.

Swarm Robotics Research

Polytechnique Montréal

In the Summer of 2018, I was working with drones in the MIST Lab at Polytechnique Montréal. The lab uses a novel programming language called Buzz to implement decentralized algorithms for swarm robotics. I integrated Buzz (which is compiled with a C compiler) in Python to interface with the drones via a remote control. My internship had an experimental component in which I trained the drones to collaboratively carry fabrics, and presented my results the following year at the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

Experimental Physics Research

University of Würzburg, Germany

In the summer of 2017, I did experimental physics research at the University of Würzburg. We used a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope to study the spins of atoms on the surface of metal substrates, and it was my responsibility to operate the microscope and to decipher how the spins were oriented on the surface of the samples. I suggested the idea that MnO chains have a chiral magnetic structure, which is the main finding in our team's publication in Nature Communications.

Grin Technologies

Electrical, Software, and Shop Technician

Grin Technologies was the perfect place to have my first engineering co-op. Grin manufactures and sells electric bicycle conversion kits which are made in-house. Not only did I gain a sweet electric bicycle from Grin, but I learned an uncountable number of skills as a software engineer, electrical engineer, electronics manufacturer, metal shop worker, and bike technician.

I started a project that took real-time serial data and updated a user interface, all independently, all in Python. Grin accompanied the software I was working on with a simple electrical device, and I had a hand in designing its circuitry. This device, the Battery Grinspector, is now manufactured and sold by Grin. I learned how solder, crimp wires, populate PCBs and test the products we were producing. I also became very familiar with the tools in the metal shop. I was constantly fabricating parts on the milling machine, band saw, drill press, and CNC machine. I spent a week or two constructing a wooden deck that spanned over 50 feet, and I gained technical experience in the maintenance and assembly of bicycles. I laced and trued many wheels for many customers and indeed for my own electric bike!

Increment Fitness

Eng Phys Capstone Project

Five of my classmates and I were granted $10,000 to found a business that would transform exercise tracking. The business was never created. Our goal was to create a product that could be installed at gyms to track gym users' exercises, and feed that information to their smartphones. We created a proof-of-concept that used deep learning and computer vision to classify 10 different exercises. We were the only project in Engineering Physics to win the Industry Award, granted by UBC Applied Science. Here is an excerpt from our final reccomendation report:

"Once connected to a computer with the corresponding software, the user can begin recording with the Xbox Kinect. The user must then input their unique user id into the software. The user can then stand about two meters away from the camera, and begin any one of the 10 allowable exercises with any of the 3 allowable weights at any time. Shortly after the user stops exercising, the system will send to an online database the exercise they did, along with information about the weight and number of repetitions. The user can walk in and out of frame as they please, and can begin any other exercise thereafter."

Autonomous Robot Competition

Winner

My three teammates and I won the 2016 Engineering Physics robot competiton. Our challenge was to make a miniature autonomous taxi robot that could locate and pick up stuffed dolls that emmited an IR signal, and drop them off at some specified location. Our robot was built from raw materials cut on a water jet cutter and a laser cutter. All of the electrical circuits were soldered onto PCBs and installed in our robot. My main contributions were the signal processing circuits, power transmission circuits, and contributions to the codebase.

Swarm

A Video Game

During my Bachelor's degree, I designed a video game and made it playable on a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). The game is written in Python. The game was "finished" well before I modified it for the SNES, but to do so, I had to get around the SNES controller timing protocol. Every 20 ms, the SNES sends the controller a portion of a 83 kHz square wave, and on a different line, the controller sends back a high pulse during the first period of the square wave if "B" is pressed, the second period if "Y" is pressed, and so on for each button on the controller. My Raspberry Pi could not read the pulses fast enough to correctly distinguish which buttons were being pushed, so I wrote a program in VHDL and put it on an FPGA to convert this timing protocol into 7 binary inputs to the Pi (one for each button). The game is also playable on a Windows PC, and a multiplayer version is playable over a LAN network.

DELECTABLE

A card game that my brother and I created

I thoroughly enjoyed working with my brother to create a card game called DELECTABLE. In the game, each player builds a restaurant by collecting chefs, servers, food products, and equipment. Our game uses a custom deck of 108 unique cards that we designed and had printed.

M.S. - Mathematics

Statistics

In 2021, I completed a Master's degree in mathematics at EPFL in mathematics. I specialized in statistics, specifically extreme value theory. My master's thesis title is Inference for space-time max-stable processes with the Markov property in time.

Dr. Zinovy Reichstein with me and my classmates

Dr. Gordon Slade with me and my classmates

B.ASc. - Engineering Physics

Class Representative

I graduated from an Engineering Physics degree at UBC, while representing my graduate class in the Engineering Physics Undergraduate Society. I graduated with a minor in honours mathematics and a specialization in electrical engineering. Eng Phys is the most intensive, and competitive engineering program offered at UBC, partly due to the number of credits we had to take, but also the amount of math and physics we take is comparable to a major in just that field. The first large project course in Engineering Physics is the Engineering Physics robot competition described above. For the second project course, we founded Increment Fitness. I graduated with an average of 87%, and more importantly, I really enjoyed my experience at UBC. Check out the link on the left for more information about Engineering Physics. The link on the right exemplifies the level of depth in physics that Engineering Physics encourages.