Hi! I’m Parker. I’m a third year PhD student in the Persist Lab at the Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science and an Innovation Program Fellow in the Dartmouth PhD Innovation Program. My PhD research so far has been at the intersection of deep learning, natural language processing, and statistics. I am particularly interested in in-context learning, structured information extraction, and statistical tools for evaluating and guiding large language models.
In addition to my research interests, I have a strong history in data science, sports (basketball/tennis/football) analytics, and teaching. I also love RPGs and cats.
Interests
- NLP
- Statistics
- ML
- Sports Analytics (basketball/tennis/football)
- Business Management
- Skyrim
Education
PhD in Computer Science, 2021-
Dartmouth College
BSc in Statistics, 2017-2021
Brigham Young University
Publications
(2023).
Statistical Depth for Ranking and Characterizing Transformer-Based Text Embeddings.
EMNLP 2023.
(2023).
Text Encoders Lack Knowledge: Leveraging Generative LLMs for Domain-Specific Semantic Textual Similarity.
EMNLP 2023 (GEM Workshop).
(2023).
The Scope of In-Context Learning for the Extraction of Medical Temporal Constraints.
IEEE ICHI 2023.
(2023).
HealthE: Recognizing Health Advice & Entities in Online Health Communities.
ICWSM 2023.
Experience
Graduate Teaching Assistant
- CS 65/165 Android Programming (Fall 2021, Dr. Xing-Dong Yang)
- CS 30 Discrete Mathematics in Computer Science (Winter 2022, Dr. Hsien-Chih Chang)
- CS 74/274 Machine Learning and Statistical Data Analysis (Spring 2022, Dr. Sarah Masud Preum)
Teaching Assistant
- Designed homework assignments and programming labs for a new Computer Science course, CS 201R Intro to Data Science
- Led weekly programming help sessions of up to 30 students
Data Science Intern
- Personally developed machine learning model for predicting healthcare provider abusive upcoding on inpatient DRG claims, projected to save up to $1,000,000 each month via audit recommendations
- Presented original research for VP of Aetna, preparing web application for live model prediction
- Engineered 100+ features for abusive upcoding model
Research Assistant
- Worked independently under Dr. Quinn Snell to build end-to-end neural network for classification of online news articles as “fake”
- Engineered unique features from news article URL, webpage metadata, and article body using custom-built word/character embeddings and NLP models
- Shipped model to flask server, built chrome extension for fake news article detection
CS Instructor
- Weekly mentored 20+ students aged 7-18 in Scratch, Python, and Java
- Trained 15+ students in common competitive programming algorithms and techniques, helping them to prepare for the USA Computing Olympiad bronze, silver, and gold divisions
Research Assistant
- Statistical researcher under Tamara Masters, Ph.D.
- Provided data modeling, analysis, insight, and creativity for 8+ research projects
Teaching Assistant
- Assisted Drs. Fellingham and Nielsen in teaching 3 large introductory statistics courses covering probability, hypothesis testing, linear regression, R programming, etc.
- Biweekly prepared and led lectures of 40+ students
Sports Analytics Research Assistant
- Collected, managed, and analyzed 5+ years of match data for BYU women’s and men’s tennis teams
- Led team of 11 interns in data collection, project ideation, and statistical analysis processes
- Built and presented player-specific probabilistic models of serving percentages by service position and point outcome, presenting research insights to head coaches
Volunteering
Volunteer
- Walking cute dogs and playing with cute cats once a week. I wish I could share photos! :(
Refugee Youth Mentor
- Met with newly-arrived (< 1 year in U.S.) teenage refugee for 2+ hours weekly, assisting in assimilation process via English tutoring, cultural activities, and mentorship
- Participated in quarterly trainings on topics ranging from English as a second language tutoring to comprehensive gang prevention
ESL Elementary School Reading Tutor
- Tutored elementary school students ages 7-10 in reading and writing English as a second language