Belmont, North Carolina, United States
I teach at Belmont Abbey College, where I teach in the History Department and direct the college's Digital Humanities program. My teaching and research focus on 20th century United States history, and artificial intelligence as a historical methodology. I also provide private consulting work for large language model programming and prompt engineering. I've worked with a number of startups and educational initiatives in utilizing generative AI.
Acting as a subject matter expert evaluating the outputs of large language models for historical accuracy as part of the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) training process.
Responsible for design and testing of prompts for creating customized teaching materials using generative AI.
I'm thrilled to have contributed my expertise to Honest Abe's Information Emporium (https://honestabes.info/), a digital history initiative examining the intersection of machine learning, artifical intelligence, and "deepfakes" with historical pedagogy and research. This project, led by Dr. Abraham Gibson, was developed as part of the Digital Literacy Accelerator initiative supported by the U.S. Department of Education (2021-2022). My key contribution to this project was the creation of "Nicolay: Exploring the Speeches of Abraham Lincoln with AI." This application harnesses the power of large language models and semantic search to provide an interactive exploration of Lincoln's historic speeches. This not only offers a new way to explore the past but also demonstrates the unique insights that AI can offer to the study of historical texts. The Nicolay app is built on Python and leverages advanced modules such as langchain and Streamlit for interacting with large language models. It employs state-of-the-art vectorized text embedding techniques for semantic search, enabling users to delve into the nuances of Lincoln's speeches in novel ways. Experience the fascinating blend of history and AI with Nicolay at: https://honestabes.info/fireside-chats/
Consulted with researchers at The Collaboratory on developing techniques for using large language models to summarize complex business documents. Using the FLAN T-5 model, I applied prompt engineering to explore different summarization approaches.