etiennefd / resume Goto Github PK

# Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Programmer and writer based in 📍 Montreal, Quebec

Email / Personal website / Blog / Twitter / LinkedIn / GitHub

• Use large language models to build an AI scientific research assistant.
• Manage gold standard data from human contractors and customers, run evaluation methods, and use prompt engineering and similar techniques to ensure high quality of LLM output.

• Freelance writing and editing, see for instance this piece on scientific style for Works in Progress
• iOS/Swift freelance work for Michael Olsen & Partnere A/S. Debugged and added features to an iOS app used to manage car dealership audits.
• The Journal of Accessible and Well-Written Science: JAWWS was a project to improve the quality of science writing that is aimed at other scientists. I have been researching ways to make a paper less cognitively demanding, as well as examining how the current norms in scientific publishing came about. As of now the project is on hiatus, but visit the website I created or the newsletter to read my writing on these topics. Has been funded by New Science.
• Interintellect: Interintellect organizes intellectual discussion salons. I worked for five months to help set up the company's website (on Wordpress) and other behind-the-scene tasks. I have also organized more than ten salons, online and in person, since December 2020.
• Blog — Atlas of Wonders and Monsters: I write a weekly blog post on various topics, now for more than 100 consecutive weeks. Feel free to subscribe.
• The Classical Futurist: A monthly magazine to think about the future from the lens of classical antiquity that I co-founded with two friends.
• Fiction: I finished and edited a novel about New France and Quebec historical cinema. It's currently in the hands of potential publishers. I also occasionally write short stories.

• Worked on a macOS app used internally by linguists to manage and update lexicographic data.
• Created new interface elements, measurements to evaluate data quality, and other features.
• Developed ways to deal with natural language data and present it to users (homophones, synonyms, rhymes, etc.) in the company’s main software product.
• Main technologies used: Swift, Objective-C, C++, Python, MySQL, Xcode, Gitlab.

• Used machine learning and NLP to mine data from medical literature on vascular surgery and train a logistic regression model to predict surgical outcomes based on patient frailty.
• Showed that text mining can be useful to preselect the features of a machine learning model when there is only a small amount of available patient data.
• Main technologies used: Python, Jupyter Notebooks, machine learning libraries.
• Supervised by Joelle Pineau and Audrey Durand

• Managed and analyzed data from cancer patients with a goal of helping physicians improve the outcomes of cancer care in the McGill University hospital network.

• Helped with the online inventory of a classical music CD vendor (2013)
• Was a camp counsellor for teenagers in French immersion for the summer in Quebec City (2012)
• Worked with hazardous materials data at two Canadian military bases (2010-2011)
• Showed visitors around and handled the telescope at a small astronomical observatory (2009)

• In 2017, I went back to school to get a full degree in computer science

• A European master's program intended to gain research experience at various universities. I spent two non-consecutive semesters at Uppsala, Sweden; one at Montpellier, France; and one at Harvard, Massachusetts.
• In France, I worked on theoretical modelling of biological innovation.
• In Sweden, I worked on paleontological data from Siberia.
• At Harvard, I worked under prof. Joe Henrich on phylogenetic trees in the context of cultural evolution in human societies.

• Minor in computer science
• Undergraduate thesis on toads and sexual dimorphism
• Highlight: a field course to learn about dinosaur paleontology in Saskatchewan
• Spent the summer of 2013 on a research internship to model food chains; I coded a simulation in Java

• French: native
• English: near-native level
• Rudimentary knowledge of Spanish and Swedish
• I like to learn new writing systems (Greek, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic)

• Apple frameworks (Swift, Objective-C, UIKit; I've done both macOS and iOS programming)
• Python
• Wordpress setup and customization
• Jekyll static websites
• Git, GitHub, GitLab
• Databases, SQL
• I know the basics of blockchains and crypto

• I have written four complete novels, none of which have been published (but I'm hoping the latest one will be)
• I have published three short stories in various literary magazines, one of which was adapted into a short film

• Typesetting: LaTeX
• Programming languages: Java, C, C++
• Data science: R, some Python libraries, machine learning (which I'm currently reviewing)