I am Demba Ba, alas not the Football player. My world came crashing one day when a grad school friend of mine informed me that I did not come up as the top search on Google. He is a great Football player. I was born in Dakar, Senegal. My mom is from Northern Senegal and my dad from Southern Mauritania. We are from the so-called "Region du Fleuve" which, historically, has been home to the Haal-pulaar-en (literally "those who speak the Pulaar language") people. I moved here in 1999 to do undergrad at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2004, I moved to the Boston area to pursue a PhD at MIT.
Currently, I am excited to be an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering in the Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences! It is great to be part of such a lively and interdisciplinary institution. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I am looking forward to it. This is my personal blog. As such, the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer, Harvard University, its affiliates or my colleagues/department.
This blog is a space I reserve for myself to write about things I am passionate about. I am passionate about many things. In the age of specialization, some might perceive this a lack of focus. My experience has taught me that some of my best ideas have come from serendipitous cross-pollineations of my various interests. James McBride, a great author, once wrote "Robbing a character of their full dimension, be it in fiction or non fiction, hurts everyone the world over". So, in here you might read posts about recent events, cooking, my love of everything audio/radio, tech and social/justice, sigma-algebras, papers I've been reading, life as an assistant professor, data science, and more...
I am proud of having set up this blog using Nikola!, a static blog generator that allows me, in one place, to include mathematical equations, code, plots generated in Python and more! This makes for such a rich writing/blogging experience. I also write about data science/academia/signal processing at Dataholiks with my friend Sourav Dey. Check us out.
I look forward to sharing with you!
Demba Ba.