Consulting: Machine learning, data, and software engineering
AI systems, agents/automation, research
My personal and professional interests in AI are strongly focused on responsible applications of machine learning, and I prioritize work related to technical AI safety and reliability.
I do independent AI safety research and am also currently working with Softmax to scale alignment. We develop and maintain a reinforcement learning environment that enables experiments for exploring collective and collaborative learning in groups of agents. The combination implicitly hinges on alignment being a key ingredient for capabilities development.
Interested in a compact overview of the foundations of artificial neural networks? My post on the design of neural networks has you covered.
Data science & signal processing
More traditional data science skills are also in my roster of tools, and I bring a graduate-level background in probability & statistics to that work.
I have significant experience with signal processing of raw data and with image reconstruction of medical imaging datasets, including statistical image reconstruction techniques.
Systems achitecture, software engineering, & data pipelines
Recent advances in frontier LLM capabilities mean that almost anyone can build practically any software system they can imagine. Still, building robust complex systems capable of evolving without disruption is another matter. Architecture and system design informed by human judgment established and battle tested in production software remains the gold standard foundation.
My experience working on large-scale internet services informs my approach to software architecture. Designing Data Intensive Applications (Kleppmann) and Software Engineering at Google (Winters, Manshreck, Wright) are trusty references. My preference is to work on backend engineering and (cloud based) infrastructure projects, but I can find my way around networking and fullstack projects, as well.
Data engineering — instrumentation, pipeline architecture, storage, analytics — are all in my wheelhouse, and I’ve been the lead on a data warehouse migration of a live and mission-critical database for an internet and mobile application serving millions of clients. I’ve coordinated bespoke and off-the-shelf tools, and also integrated third party services for custom data pipeline builds to meet efficiency, privacy, and cost objectives for transactional, client usage, and observability data.