Human-as-advisor for human-in-the-loop control
Talk, University of New Mexico Human-Centered Systems and Control Lab, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Presented my research on human-autonomy teaming in vehicle steering.
Talks and presentations
Intellectual Property Rights, IP Litigation, Economics, and Innovation
Guest lecture, New Visions STEM, Questar III BOCES, Troy, NY
Overview of US intellectual property law: copyright, trademark, trade secret, and patent law. Discussion of the economic and competitive benefits of intellectual property protection for companies and individuals, as well as the impact of intellectual property claims on individual economic decisions like cell phone purchases. Interactive exercise on patent claim drafting introduces students to the particularities of legal language and the difficulty of describing specific items and phenomena with clear, simple words.
Academic ethics and responsible studying in the age of ChatGPT
Guest lecture, New Visions STEM, Questar III BOCES, Troy, NY
Students are guided through pre-discussion learning via worksheets. Discussion is socratic style, to introduce students to common forms of discussion classes and prompt them to deeply consider the questions LLMs require developers and users to answer for responsible development, deployment, and use. Examples of LLM hallucination are used to illustrate the importance of correct prompt choices and critical reading. Students learn the nuances of academic ethics when using LLMs. Lesson concludes with an exercise in autoregression that puts the students in the place of an LLM responding to a prompt.
Introduction to reinforcement learning
Guest lecture, New Visions STEM, Questar III BOCES, Troy, NY
Lecture covers basic reinforcement learning concepts, starting from the basics of state, action, policy, and reward, then introducing the Bellman equation. Students are introduced to the differences between value iteration and Q learning and the relative advantages of each, along with simple discussion of how the problems for each method are tackled. Students simulate a reinforcement learning task in a physical, interactive exercise.
Building a pipeline for large language model fine-tuning, with a semantic search application
Talk, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA
Presented project building a pipeline for document ingestion and encoding as part of the process for preparing to fine-tune a large language model for aviation-specific applications. Project demonstrated semantic search over documents, ensuring that responses are grounded in truth and preventing hallucination. Demonstrated dramatic performance improvements over state of the art language models under aviation-specific questioning.
Intellectual Property Rights, IP Litigation, Economics, and Innovation
Guest lecture, University of Kentucky Paducah, Virtual
Overview of US intellectual property law: copyright, trademark, trade secret, and patent law. Discussion of the economic and competitive benefits of intellectual property protection for companies and individuals, as well as the impact of intellectual property claims on individual economic decisions like cell phone purchases. Concluded with a question and answer session about legal careers and intellectual property protections for burgeoning entrepreneurs.
Human-as-advisor for human-in-the-loop control
Talk, Humans in Complex Systems, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen, MD, USA
Presented the human-as-advisor approach to shared autonomy, which uses human-suggested control actions to infer system state information via a human stering model.