A. K. Mackay
Contents

A

← Andrew K. Mackay

Appendix A. All projects

Everything I have built that I am happy to discuss, grouped by topic. A selection, with figures, is on the main page under §1 Selected work.

LLMs and retrieval

2026 – present

PyTorch, tiktoken, PPO, RLHF

A Llama-style language model written from scratch in PyTorch, small enough to pre-train on a laptop, then fine-tuned with reinforcement learning.

Read the write-up →

Local RAG chatbot

2025

LangChain, FAISS, Ollama, Hugging Face embeddings, Streamlit

Chat with your own PDFs, fully offline. LangChain and FAISS handle retrieval, a local Ollama model (Phi-3) writes the answers, and Streamlit provides the interface.

Reinforcement learning

2025

Part of my MSc thesis

PyTorch, D4RL, MuJoCo, Guild AI, Hugging Face Hub

A reimplementation of the MOReL offline reinforcement learning framework with the improvements I proposed in my MSc thesis. It outperforms the original on the D4RL HalfCheetah benchmark.

Read the write-up →

2025

Part of my MSc thesis

PyTorch, D4RL, MLflow, Guild AI, Hugging Face Hub

Neural-network ensembles that learn how an environment evolves from offline data, comparing deterministic and probabilistic models. They are the learned models behind J-MOReL and MBiCEM.

Read the write-up →

Data and MLOps

Tools and other work

Matplotlib GitHub theme

2025

Python, Matplotlib

Light and dark Matplotlib themes that match GitHub's colours, so plots in a README follow the reader's theme. Most of the plots on this site were made with it.

View My Satellites

2019

World finalist, top 30 worldwide

Unity, C#

A Unity app that shows where Earth-orbiting satellites are right now, in an interactive 3D scene. Built by a team of students during the NASA Space Apps Challenge.