Benjamin Bolte

Research engineer at FAIR working on representation learning, with experience at Google and Amazon. Interested in neuroscience, deep learning, and learning without labels. Check out my blog, Github, Google Scholar, or shoot me an email.

Employment

Facebook AI Research

Seattle, January 2020 to Present

Research engineer, working on representation learning for speech with structured models

Facebook, Integrity AI NLP

Seattle, May 2018 to January 2020

Increased accuracy for classifying terrorist posts by 54% over existing baseline, resulting in 500K more terrorist propaganda posts being deleted every day

Shipped models which doubled previous accuracy for hate speech and trippled daily content actions across major markets

Deployed BERT hate speech model to content across Facebook, building the required infrastructure for ignoring benign content, which decreased server usage by 95% over initial approach

Authored team’s core NLP toolkit, featuring implementations of common NLP tools like character convolutions, tokenizers, and various attention and transformer components, with documentation, TorchScript support for productionization, and test coverage

Facebook, Care Machine Learning (Intern)

Seattle, Summer 2017

Built tools for automatically evaluating and deploying objectionable content classifiers

Tripled model refresh rate and eliminated several hours of manual work per refresh

Google Research, Handwriting Recognition (Intern)

Mountain View, Fall 2016

Improved mixed-script online handwriting recognition for Chinese-English and Devanagari-English language pairs

Trained a Generative Adversarial Network for producing handwriting using recurrent neural networks with attention components

Amazon, India Invoicing (Intern)

Seattle, Summer 2016

Build three APIs for interacting with the existing India invoicing service

Build a web framework for helping product managers answer customer questions and solve bugs

Diagnosed and fixed a Sev 2 which affected millions of dollars in transactions

Awards

ACM ICPC

1st Place, Division 2 (2017)
2nd Place, Division 2 (2016)

Dean’s Achievement Scholarship (2014 - 2017) Highest undergraduate merit award

Computational Neuroscience Training Grant (2014 - 2016) Highly competitive NIH Blueprint Grant for studying computational neuroscience at Emory and Georgia Tech