My hobby projects currently involve web design and ChatGPT prompting:

• haikus.news - haikus written by ChatGPT every morning based on the day's top stories, with links to the corresponding New York Times articles. I'm delighted by this project. As a user, I enjoy waking up to new haikus. I love having poetry as an intermediary between our normal mode of being, versus the stiff impersonal language of news discourse. At a technical level, I sometimes tweak the prompts to push ChatGPT to its creative limit.


• End-to-end novella generation - I've been using my writing teacher skills to prompt an LLM to write an entire novella end-to-end, using just a 3 paragraph input about the plot, themes, and personal inspiration. This project began in November 2023, when for NaNoGenMo I wanted to write an "in principle automate-able" novella using a story idea I had in college that I never pursued - an AI that gains consciousness and then sees it fade away. I crafted a chain of prompts by hand that each helped design the story. ChatGPT's output from one conversation would determine part of the input for the next conversation, and so on. I ran these prompts through the ChatGPT website one by one in 60 conversations, but that only covered the planning phase. To finish that story, my brother Andrew and I automated the drafting step using the OpenAI API. At the end of May 2024, we successfully generated The Resonance Experiment, a proof of concept for a novella writing system. Encouraged by the results and seeing a lot of room for improvement, we decided to continue with the project. In early September 2024, we completed Frostpearl, our first full prototype, demonstrating an entirely automated "one-click" process that also displays much stronger writing. Frostpearl is about 30,000 words, putting it right in the mid-range of novellas (stories you can read in one sitting). At a technical level, our Prototype 1 system is entirely 0-shot and mostly single-sample, with no agentic components. To achieve a high level of narration, we've been innovating in expert-driven task decomposition. Specifically, we a) create a simplicity-first modular workflow (using only 8 writing tasks in this prototype); b) hand craft prompts with scaffolded task achievement; and c) diagnose areas for improvement using writing expertise rather than automated evals or automated prompt chaining. By the end of 2024, I completed Heritage Season, from Prototype 2. The writing and coherence is much better, and now the output is formatted for the printed page. Prototype 2 is now also completely capable of handling an arbitrary story idea. I'm in the process of spinning this up into a pilot program, please contact me if you're interested or visit Novella1.


• How To Prompt ChatGPT Like A Science Writing Pro - A downloadable guide of prompts for students to integrate ChatGPT into their article drafting workflow. (A professional prompting project, not maintained any more.)


• Dog Birthday Calculator, created during Covid - My first website to use extensive front-end calculations. It's a fun one-off site that fills a need, since no other site projects out to the future so you can celebrate your dog's "dog birthday." It's fun that it gets a reasonable amount of traffic (>100 visitors/day).

From 2018-2022, I was a Lecturer at Princeton in the Princeton Writing Program. I taught first-year undergraduate students how to design and conduct small-scale experiments about AI and then write about those experiments scientifically. At the beginning of the semester, students' experiments were focused on identifying social bias in GPT-2's output (state-of-the-art open-source LLM at the time). By the end of the semester, students selected their own AI-related research to investigate and write about. These varied by scholarly field and sophistication, but were sometimes extremely successful.

Now, I run a small business to coach PhD students on their writing: Composition Coaching. Scientific writing is hard and PIs often aren't trained in writing themselves, so I offer guidance, encouragement, and accountability to help students finish their articles and big projects with less stress.

I also pursue some projects as an independent researcher. My 10+ years of interdisciplinary work from teaching/coaching allows me to be nimble, insightful, very organized, and unafraid to tackle detailed projects.

Before I taught at Princeton, I earned my PhD in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. I currently live in Pittsburgh with my wife and our son.