Welcome to My Portfolio

I remember in high school, watching a tech leader pontificate on what areas of innovation would have the greatest impact on society when he was starting his career. During the time I heard this, blockchain, electric cars, high speed trains, and quantum computing seemed like the most promising areas for 17-year-old me. I am humble enough to admit that those areas did not make the impact I had anticipated.

However, the pursuit of these areas led me to explore the intersection of technology and societal change, and as I was leaving my Bachelor's degree in Economics with a little more wisdom, I had a new revelation that AI—more than any technology that has come before it—had the potential to increase human flourishing and decrease what I call "toil". So from there, I began to pursue a career in AI driven automation.

The Early Years

I graduated from Indiana State after two years of study with a flavor of doing statistical consulting (I had the opportunity to help a number of graduate students with their theses and dissertations). I knew that ultimately the value of a Masters in Data Science would prepare me for roles that were far above the pay of what a BS in Econ could muster. Thus after a literal expected value calculation with a future value analysis, I came to the conclusion that I should forgo full time employment to ensure I could graduate from a Masters as fast as possible (a strategy I was already familiar with from my Bachelors).

However, to make ends meet, I joined Freelancer.com to earn a little extra cash. I ended up working a wide variety of jobs in data analytics and was able to join the ranks of the Preferred Freelancer Program which accredits the top 1% of freelancers in their competency. During this time I was able to help people around the globe apply data science to problems from causal analysis to predictive modeling.

While at IU for my Masters, I became obsessed with this new-ish idea of generalized pre-trained transformers. I knew this was the lever I had anticipated from AI to revolutionize the economy. I focused relentlessly on NLP and that became the topic of the research I did the rest of my Masters.

Scientia LLC

Just before graduating from my Masters in Data Science, I met the CEO of Scientia through a virtual job fair. I was extremely impressed with the company's mission to use AI to improve the safety of American Marines through base surveillance. At the time he did not have any real ML work but we resonated on mission enough that he gave me a chance and I will be forever grateful for that.

The work I did at Scientia was a stretch for me. My DS program had primarily focused on Python scripting and maybe some R. But Scientia was a Rust shop. I spent 8 months learning Rust by converting Deepstream's encoding standard to a defense compliant codec in Rust. I learned how to do hard integration work and do proper software development. The result of this work meant that the DoD could use off the shelf dedicated AI units to do their critical operations at a fraction of the cost of non-optimized GPU based solutions and spending much more on model training.

GXO

After completing the Deepstream project, I knew there was not much left for an ML specialist at Scientia so when I was contacted by XPO (later spun out to GXO), for a Lead Data Scientist position, I knew it was a great opportunity to accelerate my career.

At GXO, I was able to take my data science knowledge to real world problems. From optimizing scheduling, to classifying support tickets, to predicting labor markets, I was able to use a wide variety of ML techniques for a net impact of $3M saved under utilized labor costs.

Fractal

Ultimately, I recognized that I need to increase my impact beyond what my role at GXO could provide, thus I joined Fractal Analytics.

While at Fractal I have had the opportunity to help some of the largest companies in the world shape their AI/Agentic Strategy.

Throughline

I think a lot about the idea of BS jobs (David Graeber). So many people are toiling away in jobs that are not aligned with their passions. I believe that we can do better. AI and automation are the mechanism to reduce the toil and move people to more fulfilling work.

There will be those that try to use those same tools to eliminate from human labor entirely. But I believe that we can do better. We can use AI and automation to create new jobs that are more fulfilling and aligned with our passions and reallocate resources to more impactful areas.

Here's to making that happen. 🚀