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Steven B

- Research Program Mentor

PhD at University of Chicago

Expertise

Machine learning/AI in computer vision and NLP or Computational Biology.

Bio

I have been studying machine learning for almost a decade. It's been pretty crazy to see the exponential progress that has made and affecting so many areas. My research for my doctorate focused mostly on making machine learning models robust and trustworthy. My personal interests include reading, playing video games, and building random things. I'm currently building a cheap EEG machine to try to measure my brain waves. Feel free to ask me about any AI advances or crazy ideas (especially before AI takes over). Hope to have fun working on a project together!

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Text style transfer

Everyone has a certain style that they like to use when writing. This research project aims to be able to convert the style of text from one person to another. It will involve data collection via web scraping, data processing, and machine learning to complete.

Image Generation or Style Transfer

Image generation has come a long way and being able to more properly interact with the models that generate with the images will be very useful for lots of industries. Alternatively converting images from one style into another has long been a rite of passage for artists. Being able to generate more works in the style of artist is itself a valuable tool.

(Computation Bio) Build your own Genetic Analyzer

In this project we will explore how to find which genes and regions are conserved. How to pick a gene or protein of interest and how to analyze genomic sequences. From there this project will give you the tooling to explore other genes and even evolution of proteins. You'll be able to say with what confidence certain proteins evolved from others.

Coding skills

Python, C++, GitHub, JavaScript

Languages I know

Spanish, native speaker

Teaching experience

I volunteered to teach elementary school students about robotics (mostly math lessons and showing robots). I was a teaching assistant for 5 years at University of Chicago while pursuing my PhD. I also prepared materials for several of the courses. I taught intro to computer science and several graduate level courses such as computational biology and machine learning. I have also tutored for 2+ years at Crimson.

Credentials

Work experience

Center for AI safety (2022 - Current)
Software engineer
SpaceX (2021 - 2022)
Software engineer
Google brain (2017 - 2017)
Research engineer

Education

University of Miami
BS Bachelor of Science (2014)
Neuroscience, biochemistry and computer science
University of Chicago
PhD Doctor of Philosophy (2021)
Computer science machine learning

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