Laren Spear

I am a software engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, working in Research Computing on the AI/ML Solutions team. I graduated from Texas A&M University in 2024, earning a MS in computer science under Dr. James Caverlee. My thesis was entitled "Compressing Ethical AI: Quantization Effects Of Large Language Models For Ethical Question Answering." Prior to that, I graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 2021, majoring in Chemistry with the Elements of Computing certificate. I worked in the Computational Materials lab, funded by the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences.

October '24	I started full-time at PNNL, as a member of the AI/ML Solutions team in Research Computing!
September '24	I passed my MS thesis defense!
May '23	I started my internship at Pacific Northwest National Lab (for the second summer in a row)!
May '22	I started my internship at Pacific Northwest National Lab!
March '22	I made this website.
August '21	I started grad school at A&M!

	Software Engineer II \| Pacific Northwest National Laboratory October '24 - Present AI/ML Solutions Team
	Graduate Teaching Assistant \| Texas A&M University August '23 - May '24 Spring 2024 - CSCE 451: Software Reverse Engineering, with instructor of record Martin Carlisle. Fall 2023 - CSCE 120: Program Design and Concepts in C++, with instructor of record Michael Moore.
	Research Computing Intern \| Pacific Northwest National Lab May '23 - August '23 Built a generative question answering system for the help desk using Langchain Used BM25 to rank documents from internal databases, rerank with ColBERT, and summarize with LLama Created an API to answer questions from Confluence, past help desk logs, and FAQs
	Graduate Teaching Assistant \| Texas A&M University January '23 - May '23 Spring 2023 - CSCE 222: Discrete Math, with instructor of record Sandeep Kumar.
	Software Engineering Intern \| Pacific Northwest National Lab May '22 - August '22 Developed RESTful C# API to automate code deployment in Azure DevOps. Automated the regulatory approvals process and added a one year build artifact retention time. Developed Docker templates for standardizing containerization workflow across a teams of data scientists for deployment on mainframes.
	Graduate Researcher \| TAMU Infolab August '21 - Present Advised by Dr. James Caverlee. I work on the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.
	Graduate Teaching Assistant \| Texas A&M University August '21 - June '22 Spring 2022 - CSCE 482, Senior Design Capstone, with instructor of record Jeff Huang. Fall 2021 - CSCE 310, Database Systems, with instructor of record Tim McGuire.
	Undergraduate Research Assistant \| The University of Texas at Austin June '17 - May '20 (intermittently) Researcher in the Computational Materials lab under Juliana R. Duncan. I performed quantum mechanical simulations of bimetallic materials for the oxygen reduction reaction in hydrogen fuel cell catalysts.

Spear, L. Reactivity and Tunability of Bimetallic Materials. Poster presentation at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Symposium for Texas Researchers. September 27^th, 2019; Austin, TX.

Spear, L. Reactivity and Tunability of Bimetallic Materials. Poster presentation at the UTSA College of Sciences Research Conference. October 5th, 2018; San Antonio, TX Winner of the best visiting student award

Spear, L. Reactivity and Tunability of Bimetallic Materials. Oral presention presented at the Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium at UT Austin. September 29^th, 2018; Austin, TX. Winner for the best chemistry presentation

Edmonds, G., Spear, L., Olivares, K., and Sun, R. Reactivity and Tunability of Bimetallic Materials. Poster session presented at the Undergraduate Research Forum at UT Austin. April 13^th, 2018; Austin, TX.

	Texas A&M University \| Department of Computer Science and Engineering Scholarship August '22, August '23 $1000 department scholarship.
	TAMU Datathon CBRE Challenge \| Best NLP Hack January '21 Wrote a prototype program to extract information from image invoices and track balances for small businesses.
	The University of Texas at Austin \| College of Natural Sciences Entrepreneurship Distinction May '21 Distinction for developing a cybersecurity solution to the U.S. Government to prevent future backdoor intrusions. Given to under 5% of UT seniors. More about this award.

Modeling Zebra Finch Song Acquisition with Reinforcement Learning

CSCE 689: Deep Reinforcement Learning Course Project [link]

Created a custom OpenAI Gym environment to model the state and action space of a bird's vocalizations.

Used Advantage Actor-Critic and Proximal Policy Optimization to model the dopamine response for singing correct and incorrect notes.

Added discounting for back-to-back correct song performances to increase exploration and maximize normalized reward.

Code Judge - Programming Practice Website

CSCE 606: Software Engineering Course Project [link]

Automated code judging system, like Codeforces, for A&M students.

Ruby on Rails with Postgres, deployed to Heroku via Docker image.

Actively maintained, used for intro programming classes at A&M.

Explainable Hate Speech Detection

CSCE 704: Data Analytics in Cybersecurity Course Project [link]

Tree-based methods with similar performance to HateBERT, a fine-tuned BERT model for hate speech detection.

Workshops Officer | Aggie Data Science Club
January '22 - May '23

I present biweekly workshops on topics such as SQL, Python data analysis libraries, and applied machine learning. More about the club on the Aggie Data Science Club website.

I used to be a DJ, playing electronic music at clubs around Austin, Texas. I also had a weekly radio show on KVRX 91.7 FM. Past episodes can be found here.
I collect vinyl records, with an emphasis on white label DJ promo releases as well as music that never got a digital release. Browse my collection here.
I worked at a craft cocktail bar in San Antonio, Texas called RD Speakeasy.
I used to be a semi-professional Super Smash Bros. Melee player and tournament organizer.
At one point, I held a world record in Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 (like Pandas creator Wes McKinney!)
I lived in Brighton, England on study abroad, and I wrote a travel blog of my experiences.
My first research experience was with the Welch Summer Scholars Program when I was in high school. I did chemistry research.
I like to edit Wikipedia, especially computer science articles that I feel are neglected.
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This website is a derivative of Rishab Khincha's website, which is a derivative of Jon Barron's website. It later inspired the website of Eric Nunes.

Find the source code to my website here.