Florian Hartmann
I work on computer control agents and on collaborative learning with LLMs at Google DeepMind. Previously, I wrote my master's thesis on federated learning, spent a few wonderful months at Mozilla working on a Firefox implementation, and then continued to work on federated learning at Google Research for a few years. Prior to that, I also interned on Differential Privacy and recommender systems at Mozilla, and on NLP at Amazon.
I occasionally like to develop apps, such as a clipboard manager or a Hacker News client. During high school, I published several popular JavaScript libraries.
2025
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What I read in 2025
Some notes on the books I read the past year
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Gemma 3n
Computer control capabilities of the new Gemma model
2024
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What I read in 2024
Some notes on the books I read the past year
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Social Learning
Towards collaborative learning with large language models
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LLMs Understand Base64
Learning is compression
2023
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What I read in 2023
Some notes on the books I read the past year
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Distributed Differential Privacy for Federated Learning
Distributed training with formal privacy guarantees that hold end-to-end
2022
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What I read in 2022
Some notes on the 52 books I read the last 52 weeks
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Working on Federated Learning
Why working on federated learning is interesting, meaningful and fun
2021
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What I read in 2021
Some notes on the books I read this year
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Federated Smart Text Selection
What I worked on at Google the past couple of years
2020
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What I read in 2020
Some notes on the books I read this year
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Diffing
Using the longest common subsequence to compute diffs
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That XOR Trick
Solving problems creatively with XOR
2019
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What I read in 2019
Some notes on the books I read this year
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Reservoir Sampling
Sampling from streams
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Count-Min Sketch
A probabilistic data structure for data stream summaries
2018
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What I read in 2018
Some notes on the books and papers I read this year
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TensorFlow
A bottom-up guide to computational graphs and tensors
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Quines
Self-reproducing programs
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Federated Learning for Firefox
Distributed machine learning for the Firefox URL bar
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Estimation Theory and Machine Learning
Formalizing what it means to compute good estimates
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Federated Learning
An introduction to collaborative machine learning
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RProp
Gradient descent without using gradient magnitudes
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Probabilistic Quantization
A probabilistic compression technique for Federated Learning
2017
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What I read in 2017
Some notes on the books I read this year
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Add-on recommendations for Firefox users
A Mozilla Context Graph blog reading suggestion
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Differential Privacy
Learning statistics while preserving the privacy of individual users
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Bloom Filters
A probabilistic data structure for sets