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Alex C

- Research Program Mentor

PhD Doctor of Philosophy candidate

Expertise

machine learning, data science, NLP, language generation, data journalism, deep learning, web scraping, creative coding, narrative generation, AI

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.

Build an AI clone

Let's train an AI to mirror a specific style, such as the work of Mahatma Ghandi, or your chat history. We will gain experience collecting training data (which may be stored in hard-to-access forms such as chat logs or PDF's), training a machine model using this data, and potentially even deploying it somewhere. Along the way, we will learn how to use language models to interrogate the data that we trained it on. An example is this project I worked on, where we trained a language model to write like an Instagram influencer: https://www.instagram.com/myfriendsylvia/?hl=en

Create a graph database from unstructured data

Journalists and social scientists are turning to NLP to understand complex relationships among documents and the entities they reference. An example is a story I worked on for WIRED, for which we built a graph database out of Twitter posts, and used this to discover mistakes in Twitter's disinformation policy. https://www.wired.com/story/how-americans-wound-up-on-twitters-list-of-russian-bots/

Coding skills

python, sklearn, pytorch, spark, selenium, flask, p5, javascript, web design, APIs, others!

Interested in working with expert mentors like Alex?

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