Resume: Jonathan Whitaker

Jonathan Whitaker

AI Researcher

I love working on new challenges, and tend to gravitate to any role that lets me exercise my key skills:

  • Breaking down and understanding deep technical concepts. (research)
  • Figuring out how to practically apply these to real-world problems. (development)
  • Communicating these concepts with others. (teaching)

I also have an unusual grab-bag of extra skills or interest areas, which come in useful from time to time :)

EXPERIENCE

R&D at Answer.AI

2024 - PRESENT

  • A new and exciting project to figure out what this AI stuff is actually useful for, with a fantastic team of researchers.

AI Education and Research

SEPTEMBER 2022 - PRESENT

  • Joined forces with Jeremy Howard and friends to build Part 2 of the Fast.ai course. We still meet twice a week to discuss the latest research and work on our own experiments, with the focus gradually shifting to LLMs
  • Created the Hugging Face Diffusion Models Class, and currently co-authoring a book with some collaborators building on that work
  • Sharing learning material through my Data Science Castnet blog and YouTube channel

Consulting - Generative AI

2022 - 2023

  • Builder-in-residence at PlaygroundAI, where I helped train their first in-house Stable Diffusion variant and worked on numerous guidance, instruction-following, and sampling improvements (Jan - June 2023)
  • Smaller clients, working on image classification + generation, text, and most recently 3D-related R&D

Consulting - Data Science

2017 - 2021

  • Senior Data Scientist at Zindi (a data science competitions platform) where I was responsible for preparing data for competitions, creating baselines etc… an excellent way to get better across NLP, CV, and tabular domains!
  • Various analytics and deep learning projects, with a specialty of mine being GIS and remote sensing work.
  • Helped create and deliver various online courses around data science, machine learning, and ‘big data’ in collaboration with Ixio Analytics (a consulting firm I was part of) and the African Leadership University. I was also a lead instructor for iXperience’s “Data Science” summer class.