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With the intention of sharing knowledge more widely—and, importantly, keeping a record for myself—I’m starting to jot down thoughts here. My plan is to write at least three working days a week. Naturally, everything shared will be personal reflections and hypothetical scenarios based on what I hear, learn, read or recall from various places, also from present and past; any resemblance to real events is purely coincidental.
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Sometimes projects must be reprioritised—it’s inevitable as business needs shift, markets evolve, and the macroeconomic winds change. A mature leader shields their team as best they can, just as you expect your own manager to shield you too. But inevitably, some of the turbulence splashes through. These are the moments that test your ability to balance the scientific significance of the work with its commercial impact. And, like all good days and bad, these moments too will pass. Hope that the good talent cultivated over time doesn’t slip through the cracks—yet experience shows it often does. Uncertainty is the true killer of motivation.
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A Feature Store can be a Data Scientist’s most impactful — and most complex — product. In a mature company, it must power future models while retrofitting past ones, with automation, CI/CD, and clear ownership built in. Senior DSs should lead, not leave ML Engineers scavenging model by model. Get the prep right — from aggregation windows to DS-driven feature pushes — and let DSs do the first round of data exploration and feature engineering before bringing in ML Engineers. Skip that, and you risk watching DS work die a slow spiritual death.
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When population size is low and the expected effect size from a treatment is small, experimenters feel powerless in detecting statistically significant results.
Rotation Curve of the Milky Way Galaxy
Front Page Coverage of Our Latest Discovery about the MW Galaxy and its Weight, in Nepali National Daily.
Published in Astrophysical Journal, 2012
This study presents a kinematic analysis of the Galactic halo using 4664 blue horizontal branch stars from the SDSS/SEGUE survey, determining velocity dispersion profiles and the anisotropy profile up to a radius of approximately 60 kpc.
Recommended citation: Kafle, P. R., Sharma, S., Lewis, G. F., & Bland-Hawthorn, J. (2012). "Kinematics of the Stellar Halo and the Mass Distribution of the Milky Way Using Blue Horizontal Branch Stars." Astrophysical Journal, 761(2), 98. https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/761/2/98
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Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018
This study employs high-velocity planetary nebulae to determine the escape velocity and total mass of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), revealing a virial mass of 0.8 × 10¹² Mₛₒₙ and a radius of 240 kpc.
Recommended citation: Kafle, P. R., Sharma, S., Lewis, G. F., Robotham, A. S. G., & Driver, S. P. (2018). "The Need for Speed: Escape Velocity and Dynamical Mass Measurements of the Andromeda Galaxy." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 475(3), 4043–4054. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty082
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Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018
This study introduces the “galtag” algorithm, which enhances photometric redshift accuracy and group richness estimation by probabilistically associating faint galaxies with observed galaxy groups from a spectroscopic survey.
Recommended citation: Kafle, P. R., Robotham, A. S. G., Driver, S. P., Deeley, S., Nørgaard-Nielsen, P., & Drinkwater, M. J. (2018). "Galaxy Tagging: Photometric Redshift Refinement and Group Richness Enhancement." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 479(3), 3746–3761. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty1536
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Published in Nature, 2020
This study identifies the Phoenix stellar stream as the debris of a globular cluster with a metallicity of [Fe/H] = −2.7, challenging the previously thought metallicity floor for globular clusters.
Recommended citation: Wan, Z., Lewis, G. F., Li, T. S., et al. (2020). "The tidal remnant of an unusually metal-poor globular cluster." Nature, 583, 768–770. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2483-6
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