Alec M.

I studied the sociology of knowledge at Cornell, graduating with a PhD in 2023. Skill include statistical modeling, network analysis, machine learning, text analytics, big-data analysis, writing analytical reports, and doing literature review. I mostly work in Python, but have also used R, STATA, and SAS. I have published 6 peer-reviewed articles in addition to the dissertation itself.

Besides academics, I am a full-stack developer, most recently co-founding the (now-dead) Needed Networks. This company provided services to inmates over the telephone, including Wikipedia, ChatGPT, and Google Translate. The service was mostly used by prisoners to connect on voice calls between prisons. This has to my knowledge never before been possible, and made a world of difference to the inmates. At its peak (before Ohio shut it down) the service connected 10k calls a day between 3k inmates. Besides writing and maintaining 10k lines of code, a Flask app with Mongo backend which interfaced with Twilio and self-hosted Whisper, I also designed the customer service interface, hired a customer service department, programmers, an assistant, and a project manager, and navigated legal, technological, and social challenges which I’m happy to describe in person. Although a small project in the scheme of things, I believe it illustrates my skills and my ability to function in unfamiliar spaces.

Since graduation I have been working on several projects in the LLM space. A therapist, a political mediator, and a situation simulator, all of which I have been working with my network of academic and industry experts at carrying over into polished products.