Working with an incredible team on some cutting-edge research. Key focus: finding and sharing pragmatic approaches to training and utilizing generative AI. We showcase some of our early results and insights in the latest free Fast.ai course, "From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion" (https://course.fast.ai/Lessons/part2.html).

As an AI researcher, my job was to improve the models and techniques underlying Playground's AI-powered image creation and editing tool. Key contributions:
- Building on stable diffusion with a number of improvements across data, training, and inference
- Integrating new research findings into the product
I enjoyed helping kickstart the AI research efforts here, and seeing firsthand how research ideas can feed directly into an improved experience for users.

Created the Hugging Face Diffusion Models Course to help bring more people up to speed on the latest generative modeling techniques. The course ran "live" via Discord with ~5k participants, and the material remains up and free for anyone to use. As always it was a pleasure working with the Hugging Face team :)(https://github.com/huggingface/diffusion-models-class)

Contract work for various organizations, including:- Teaching positions like Head Teacher (Data Science) for iXperience or teaching Deep Learning with Neuromatch Academy. Both are great short courses run online once or twice a year.- GIS work with a few Zimbabwean companies in the ecology/reforestation space.- Personal projects like my AIAIART course (https://github.com/johnowhitaker/aiaiart) which I run for free, or the many smaller projects which end up on my blog (https://datasciencecastnet.home.blog/)

Preparing data for competitions, establishing performance baselines, writing tutorials, and implementing winning solutions. Thanks to the wide variety of competitions, this was an incredible crash-course in applying data science to a number of new domains!

Developed course content for the African Leadership University's Industrial Internetprogram as a consultant for Ixio Analytics, and then helped to deliver that content both online and in person. Also worked on smaller contracts with Ixio from time to time (mostly as 'the deep learning guy').