Richard Menzies

Latest Writing

Richard Menzies
1 March 2024

Decay Based Pruning

How soft pruning - gradually decaying weights out of a network instead of cutting them in a single step - preserves information and outperforms hard pruning at high sparsity, across classification, autoencoding and latent-space dimensionality reduction.

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Richard Menzies
1 February 2023

Neural Topology Optimisation

A discussion on the current state of neural topology optimisation, why this area is under developed and the groundbreaking advances that lie ahead.

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Richard Menzies
1 March 2022

Constant Variance Weight Initialisation

Proposing a new method of neural network weight initialisation called Constant Variance Weight Initialisation, that is an extension of He initialisation for every activation function.

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Projects

Richard Menzies
30 November 2025

Chess Scotland Executive Director

I am the Chess Scotland Executive Director and have spearheaded several inititives, the most well known of which is Chess960. Under my leadership, Chess Scotland is the first chess federation in the world to officially recognise Chess960 grading, a bold and innovative move.

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Richard Menzies
1 April 2025

Openbook Analytics Co-Founder

I'm the founder of a innovatve stock market analysis platform. We provide a score base system to enable a significant boost in speed and accuracy of stock choice.

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Richard Menzies
1 September 2019

Phyics Society Secretary

I was the Physics Society Secretary at the University of Glasgow, and designed the logo which is still in use today. This involved major event organisation and oragnisation of different phyics events throughout the semister. Covid happened during this time and while many STEM societies shutdown, the physics Society survived, absorbed the finances of the other societies and redistributed finances when the other STEM socities got back on their feet.

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Richard Menzies
1 June 2019

GU Table Tennis Club Founder

I founded the table tennis club at the University of Glasgow, and over several years got this affiliated with the Glasgow University Sports Association.

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