cv

General Information

Full Name Alexander (Alex) Gurung
Languages English (native), French (intermediate)

Education

  • 2023-2026
    PhD in Informatics @ ILCC
    University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, U.K
    • Supervised by Mirella Lapata
    • (CHIRON) Rich Character Representations in Long-Form Narratives
  • 2020-2022
    Master of Science in Computer Science
    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, U.S.A
    • Concentration in Machine Learning
  • 2018-2020
    Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, U.S.A
    • Minor in Linguistics

Research Experience

  • 2020-now
    Graduate Researcher
    Social and Language Technologies Group, Georgia Institute of Technology
    • Investigating the processes and distribution of radicalization on insular social medias
    • Finetuned and domain-adapted language models to detect radical content and assess its distribution across multiple alt-tech platforms
    • Investing dehumanization language as a gateway to further radicalization, and quantifying its spread amongst far-right recruiters
  • 2021-2022
    AI Resident
    ParlAI & LIGHT Teams, Meta AI
    • Worked with the LIGHT team to improve commonsense understanding in text-adventure games
    • Designed crowdsourcing tasks to collect a large dataset of game playthroughs, action-result pairs, and human evaluations
    • Created novel grounding tasks to improve a model’s ability to reason about its environment
    • Preprint available on arxiv
  • 2021-2021
    ML Graduate Research Assistant
    Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory, Georgia Tech Research Institute
    • Leveraged adversarial neural techniques for data augmentation to improve generalization performance
    • Expanded Genetic Programming framework’s CV capabilities with image feature extraction techniques
  • 2019-2020
    Undergraduate Researcher
    Automated Algorithm Design Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology
    • Optimized cache invalidation for lab’s framework improving results by 213%
    • Led new NLP team in adding core text embedding functionality to framework using Tensorflow and Word2Vec

Work Experience

  • 2021 - 2021
    ML Engineer Intern
    Trust & Safety Team, TikTok
    • Designed and evaluated neural architectures to improve region-specific auto-moderation performance
    • Deployed new models to production and set up pipeline to evaluate changes in performance over time
  • 2020-2021
    Software Engineer Intern
    Search Team, The Home Depot
    • Built new dynamic product recommendation system leveraging visual similarity embeddings
    • Trained and deployed AutoML, BQML, and RNN models to GCP for predicting ”at-risk” shipments during emergencies