About
Hi there, I am Tommy White. This website is meant to serve as a professional portfolio of sorts for me as I work in the CS and AI industries.
Here are the footnotes about me:
- I grew up in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle.
- I graduated with my undergraduate degree from Cal Poly SLO with a major in computer science and a minor in data science.
- I spent about 2.5 years as a PhD student/research assistant at Dartmouth in a fast-paced lab focusing on the intersection between security problems and ML, but I ended up leaving my lab during the pandemic to pursue further career/personal growth as well as stability in industry.
- I graduated with a Masters degree in Computer Science in December 2021.
- I have worked at American Express since 2022 in the space of AI/ML applied research.
- I am not actively looking for work, though I maintain interest in exciting opportunities in the fields of machine learning, data science/engineering, cybersecurity, or more general backend software engineering.
- Skills include Python (including pandas/numpy/pytorch/dask/tensorflow/keras/sklearn/etc), C++, Java, LaTex/Markdown, Git, R/ggplot, Linux/bash programming, distributed computation, large-scale computation, deep learning, work with LLMs, graph neural networks, social network analysis, and more.
- See here for an old version of my resume, as available publicly, on Github. Reach out to me if you need more details than I make available here.
- Hobbies include skiing/snowboarding, surfing, paddleboarding, playing soccer/tennis, watching soccer/football, and hiking.
If you want more details, see the rest of the content in this page as well as my projects page.
Table of contents
Education
Undergraduate
I graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 2018 with my Bachelor’s in Computer Science as well as a rigorous, cross-disciplinary minor in data science. During my time there I did a lot to keep myself busy:
- Worked as a research intern on a team which focused on signal processing at the Aerospace Corporation, a research organization which closely collaborates with the Air Force.
- Interns got to see the launch pad for a Delta IV Heavy rocket in the summer that I worked there just a couple weeks before the rocket was set to take off!
- My work ended in a term-length project in which I conducted a proof-of-concept for a physically-based preprocessing technique, where I showed the tradeoff between accuracy and time saved if we were to implement the technique.
- Served as treasurer, then president of the Data Science Club at Cal Poly, organizing recruting events and giving talks about machine learning concepts.
- Taught myself how to surf.
- Worked as a junior developer on the Amazon Prime team for a bit under a year (part time during terms with classes, full time during summer)
- Worked on backend code to ensure customers could receive their prime benefits.
- Rewrote and owned the code deployment and rollback pipeline which enabled our team to be able to react more quickly to issues in production.
- Worked as a peer data science assistant at the campus library.
- Completed my senior project over two terms in collaboration with a local AI company, Unanimous AI.
- Completed my data science minor capstone project over two terms in collaboration with FICO.
One of my graduation pictures with my parents.
Graduate
After Cal Poly, I headed straight to grad school at Dartmouth College, pursuing a PhD in Computer Science. I began research in the Dartmouth Security and Artificial Intelligence Lab immediately upon arrival. In the first year, I spent much of my time writing code for experiments and reading hundreds of papers to prepare for writing research papers in the field of ML as applied to graph data and security problems. Toward the end of the first year and into my second year I began finishing projects, attending/presenting at conferences and publishing work.
Unfortunately, my relationship with my advisor deteriorated - in large part due to the size of our lab with over 10 students to one advisor. Further, as I spent more time in the academic environment, I simply realized that the work and schedule associated with most jobs that require a PhD (mostly the grant-writing and grinding for funding/submission deadlines) did not match up with my passions.
After struggling with the stress and disillusionment this caused - which was only compounded by the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 - I eventually realized that I had to leave the lab and attempt to get a master’s degree for my own mental health and growth. I completed the degree requirements for a Master’s in Computer Science in the fall term of 2021 at Dartmouth.
Me in front of the Baker Tower at Dartmouth
(Not) looking for work!
Though I am currently not looking for work, I am always open to discussing interesting and exciting opportunities that will allow me to grow as a professional and a person. My primary passions within the CS space are applied computation, and backend development. In the applied computation space, I am most interested in data science, machine learning, cybersecurity/cryptography, social network analysis, and physical simulation, but I have a general passion for thoroughly optimizing code designed for big data problems. In backend development, I would be most interested in architecture and design of elegant software solutions, as I have always enjoyed the finer points of abstraction and modularization. That said, my primary experience is in data science/AI/ML applications in a rapid prototyping development - so if re-entering the software field I would need to be onboarded to an effective team in order to have the support needed to grow as a software engineer.
What I am looking for
Location
One of my biggest personal projects over the past couple of years has been to support my girlfriend during her medical school applications. This has included dozens of hours of studying, editing essays, and discussing options for her future. This year she did it! As a result, I have transitioned to working fully virtually at AMEX and we have moved to Ontario, California. As a result, I am only looking for work which is either in the LA/Irvine area (if required in office daily), within a ~4-6 hour drive with an understanding that the difference in current pay to new pay would need to be higher (if hybrid, would rent a studio or hotel room in town to spend 3 days a week at the office), or anything fully remote.
Position
I enjoy working in a position where I have a clear path for progression at the company. I work best when I am faced with a challenging problem, so I would prefer to work in a team which actively strives to innovate. I am primarily qualified for and looking for a position in designing/deploying machine learning algorithms and systems. I am also very interested in working in cybersecurity, physical simulation, or other applied computing fields. I would also be interested in positions involving data engineering or designing large-scale backend solutions.
My qualifications
I have a Bachelor’s degree from Cal Poly, SLO, where I majored in computer science and minored in data science.
I have completed a Master’s in Computer Science at Dartmouth College, with degree conferral expected soon.
Coding skills
- I use Python (barring heavily used computational code or GPU code - where I will use C++) in my machine learning work and for any small scripts I need to write. As such, most of my project work has been and will mostly continue to be in Python.
- Proficient (if a bit rusty) with Java, having used it throughout my undergraduate education as well as during my one year junior developer position at Amazon in a system with very high transactions per second as part of the Prime team.
- Proficient with C/C++ (and planning to learn Rust soon) and comfortable using Makefiles to specify dependencies.
- Comfortable using LaTex and Markdown to generate tidy documents.
- Competent with Git and getting better at using it each day.
- Happy to learn new languages/frameworks.
Technical skills
- Experience with organizing computation for reliable, parallelized computation on very large datasets.
- Processed ~4 TB of data in one social media project, in a set of computations which required thousands of CPU hours.
- Comfortable using and designing APIs.
- Have done data scraping using pushshift, Reddit, Twitter, Google Cloud and other APIs, following rate limits where necessary.
- When at Amazon, my team focused on maintaining and improving an internal API to handle Prime benefit requests for clients based on a customer’s region and Prime type.
- Excellent at taking raw data and engineering a tidy, efficient form to use in the future.
- Proved crucial when managing thousands of computation jobs on somewhat unreliable computation cluster.
- Key skill I gained was designing appropriate data artifacts, allowing my programs to identify missing/errant artifacts and run computation as necessary.
- I design code in a modular style which minimizes duplication of code. This also leads to a project structure which is easy to understand and consequently easier to work with.
- Often complimented on the readability of my code
Hobbies
Skiing/snowboarding
I was very lucky to be afforded the opportunity to learn to ski at a very young age by my parents and a non-profit program at my school to offer subsidized ski/snowboard programs. Because of this, I have been skiing since I was a kid. Later on, I picked up snowboarding and liked it even better than skiing! I even taught both skiing and snowboarding at the local mountain while in high school in order to get my season pass. I managed to snowboard most weekends during the winter while living in New Hampshire. When I lived on the central coast of California to attend Cal Poly, I had to give up snowboarding for years because it was almost 4 hours to the nearest mountain and I was busy with my studies. Now that I live just an hour’s drive away from Bear Mountain, I will be teaching my girlfriend how to snowboard over the next couple of years.
A view from below of a foggy ski run at Killington Ski Resort in Vermont
Surfing
To fill the void left behind by snowboarding, I decided to learn how to surf with some friends of mine. Four of us in all learned how to surf together purely through repetition. Eventually we got pretty good, and I fell in love with the sport. I enjoyed it so much I even ended up making my own surfboard in a program offered by Cal Poly. Since returning to California, I have been setting up plans to get back into it in southern California!
Paddleboarding
Being located over an hour and a half from the ocean, Dartmouth is not a good place for a surfer. The beautiful lakes and rivers in the area, however, provided a fantastic place for me to learn how to paddleboard (by falling in - a lot). Paddleboarding has provided an excellent way to stay active and get out into nature, as well as some stunning views!
A view from the middle of Mascoma Lake in Enfield, NH
Other hobbies
I try to stay fit by working out and playing soccer and tennis (though I am not particularly good at either). Though I played soccer since I was a kid, I only picked up tennis at 17. I also enjoy hiking, camping, watching soccer, watching football, and reading.