To train user models / personal agents that best understand us, it helps to have access to all of our scattered digital footprint. For my first release in my PhD, I’m open-sourcing **Homecoming**, a desktop app that automatically aggregates all your personal context across all applications that you’ve accessed over your lifetime. It helps auto-request your data packages from over 2000 supported websites, and manages them locally in one place you can query, explore, and use for any downstream application. All your messages, emails, tiktok scrolling activity, goodreads, netflix, strava… even your 6th grade Wattpad account. You can even explore the features companies use to target ads at you. This project was super fun to work on as I realized there is so much data about me that I didn’t even know existed. It’s a nice feeling to gain sovereignty over my data. All data stays local, unless you choose otherwise. Lmk how it is! Blog: Link to download:

Hello my 406 twitter followers. Hopping on to share two things: 1. I’ve started a CS PhD at Stanford! For the love of the game ofc. 2. I’m releasing impersona-env, a proof of concept to train personalized assistants by building an RL environment out of user models. Your assistant learns to help you by repeated asking a simulated version of you questions, probing its internal latent thinking and feedback, and updating its priors accordingly. I think this unlocks a new dimension to personalization beyond discrete fact recall. My personal assistant model now understands nuances of my preferences that even I didn’t know about. Full blog: It’s still a proof of concept and there’s still a ton of things to figure out in this space. It’s unclear to me how to build user model evals that generalize across users and downstream applications, how to best represent longitudinal personal data at training time // inference time, the interplay between population level and individual level preferences, the immense questions surrounding privacy and hillclimbing in decentralized data access regime… if you want to chat on anything in this area please dm me!