Work Experience
CarperAI
Machine Learning Researcher
- Working with a team of researchers building a legal foundation model aligned with human preferences, as captured in data from court rulings, laws, and regulations.
- Built pipeline for labeling legal text with rewards at the sentence level for conditional human preference pretraining as in Anthropic's paper, Pretraining Language Models with Human Preferences.
- Owned evaluation pipeline for benchmarking state-of-the-art language models (including Claude, GPT-4, and our own models) on legal tasks like bar exam questions, CaseHold, and LegalBench.
Stealth Startup
Founding Engineer
San Francisco, CA
2022 – Present
- Privacy and legal startup using technology to facilitate trust and promote access to justice. Scoped, architected, and built full-stack web application with Next.js and Tailwind. Drove key decisions related to product design and strategy.
Stanford Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab
Empirical Research Fellow
- Led project with the IRS to improve audit selection with machine learning, and worked with Santa Clara County on data-driven interventions using active learning to measure and improve COVID-19 monitoring and control.
- Developed algorithms for probabilistic race and ethnicity imputation, offline geocoding, and bootstrapped phylogenetic analysis to analyze the efficacy of COVID-19 interventions and their effects on health equity.
- Applied recent self-supervised tabular deep learning models to improve data efficiency for predicting tax noncompliance.
Element Energy
Software Engineer
- Built a cloud-based data analysis platform to analyze battery sensor data. Wrote scripts to simulate IoT devices, and built out a secure data pipeline to securely stream telemetry data to the cloud.
- Used cloud software such as AWS IoT Core, AWS Kinesis streams, Elasticsearch, and Kibana dashboards to transform, analyze, and visualize telemetry data.
Bluebonnet Data Fellowship
Data Engineer
- Selected for Bluebonnet Fellowship, which trains technical graduate and undergraduate students to work with political data, and matches them with political campaigns as volunteers.
- Led efforts to build data infrastructure for the Christy for Congress campaign, including automated data transformation from SQL database into reports and tables in Google Sheets.
- Built a dashboard web application using Dash to automatically generate reports on key campaign performance indicators.
Bridgewater Associates
Investment Associate Intern
- Produced a research report on possible threats posed to Amazon by antitrust, and implications for the stock market.
- Wrote 5+ case studies of sovereign defaults; analyzed causal mechanisms to develop a unified theory of debt crises.
- Conducted qualitative research and exploratory data analysis on global metals markets.
D.E. Shaw & Co.
Energy Analyst
- Developed and tested statistical models to forecast natural gas fundamentals, and researched the future trajectory of renewable energy, focusing on the impact of tax credits and energy prices.
- Underwent rigorous hands-on training in trading energy markets, with a focus on power and natural gas.
- Participated in seminars with traders and business school professors, covering topics such as valuation, behavioral finance, and how to trade markets including equities, commodities, and currencies.
Publications & Projects
Measuring the Effectiveness of COVID-19 Surveillance Strategies to Identify Transmission Links with Whole-Genome Sequencing Data
Benjamin Anderson, Derek Ouyang, Vit Kraushaar, Alexis D’Agostino, Sarah L. Rudman, Brandon Bonin, and Daniel E. Ho
(Not) Your Type: Race, Dating, and Wrongful Discrimination
Benjamin Anderson
Ethics in Society Honors Thesis
Education
Stanford University
M.S. in Computer Science, 4.0 GPA
- Coursework: Parametric and non-parametric statistics, machine learning theory, natural language processing, computer vision, reinforcement learning, Bayesian networks, big-data mining, algorithm design and analysis, computer systems, computer and network security, cryptography, complexity and information theory, linear algebra, multivariate calculus, web applications.
- Teaching: Led discussion & developed exams for the course “CS142: Web Applications,” covering HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, databases, network security, & frameworks for building large-scale production web applications.
- Academic Distinctions: Selected for Siebel Scholars Program, a fellowship awarded to a handful of outstanding graduate students studying computer science, business, and bioengineering in the top graduate programs in the country.
Stanford University
B.A. in Philosophy with distinction, 4.1 GPA
- Coursework: Logic, metalogic, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, feminist philosophy, political philosophy.
- Academic Distinctions: Phi Beta Kappa, interdisciplinary honors in Ethics in Society, Lyle and Olive Cook Prize for top Ethics in Society honors thesis, Boothe Prize for Excellence in First-Year Writing.
Skills
- Programming Languages: Strongly proficient in Python (including PyTorch), JavaScript (front-end and back-end), and R (
tidyverse and bioinformatics). Limited experience with C++, Rust, and Golang. - Other Skills: Training, debugging, and evaluating machine learning models (including transformers) in PyTorch, Weights & Biases, HuggingFace Accelerate and Transformers libraries, linear algebra, Docker, AWS, FastAPI & Express, React, Next.js, Tailwind,
styled-components, numpy, pandas, Jupyter, SQL, databases, static site generators.