About me

I am a machine learning engineer with a background in applied statistics and international development evaluation. I work as a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Ought, an applied research lab building Elicit, an automated research assistant, where I have worked on semantic search and techniques to make language models more truthful.

I also have a PhD in Philosophy from Fordham University, with a dissertation on the intentionality of mathematical understanding, following a classical phenomenological approach. In my dissertation, I answer questions like:

• What do you have to “see” or “get” exactly, to understand the infinity of primes?
• What about Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem? How is what you “see” when you understand that theorem related to what you see when you see a mathematically similar theorem like the unsolvability of the halting problem?
• How do you make sense of both the freedom and strictures of mathematical inquiry?
• What, if anything, makes one mathematical question or set of axioms more “natural” than another?

I created Philosophical Graphiti, a tool for exploring relationships among philosophical topics, and Earworm, a search engine for royalty-free music based on musical similarity, with in-browser embeddings.

I like to climb rocks.