Brendon Miller- Boldt
Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His mercy endures forever.
I am a Catholic, husband, father, philosopher, researcher, and wearer of a few other hats. Surname-wise, I go by "Miller-Boldt" personally and "Boldt" professionaly. My current profession is pursing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technology Institute working with David Mortensen. My research centers around meta-scientific issues in computer simulations of language evolving from scratch, that is, emergent language. This research naturally incorporates aspects of linguistics, philosophy of science, machine learning, natural language processing, and information theory. At the moment, I intend to achieve the following in my dissertation:
- Descrying what aspects of human language emergent language ought to replicate in order to be useful for linguistics, natural language processing, robotics, and beyond
- Creating a well-defined metric (or set thereof) for quantifying these aspects of human language
- Illustrating how to organize individual research works on emergent language into cohesive, general knowledge about the field
Publications and Preprints
Selected Works
- Case Study: Deontological Ethics in NLP - Equal co-author with Shrimai Prabhumoye discussing specifically how NLP literature addressing ethical issues could benefit from taking a more philosophically rigorous approach. In this case we look at applying deontological principles to ethical reasoning in NLP. (Published at NAACL 2021, arXiv)
For a full list of publication, please look at Google Scholar. Google Scholar
Education
- Carnegie Mellon University - PhD in Language and Information Technology (Pittsburgh, PA; 2021-present; in progress)
- Carnegie Mellon University - Master of Language Technology (Pittsburgh, PA; 2019-2021; in progress)
- Marist College - B.S. in Computer Science and Philosophy (Poughkeepsie, NY; 2014-2018)
- Providence Academy - Catholic K-12 Education (Plymouth, MN; 2001-2014)
Positions
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission - Software Developer Contractor (New York, NY; 2018-2019)
- Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems - Natural Language and Robotics Researcher (Kaiserslautern, Germany; Summer 2017)
- Marist College - Independent Researcher (Poughkeepsie, NY; Fall 2016)
- Siena Institute for Artificial Intelligence - REU Student (Loudonville, NY; Summer 2016)
- Marist College - Research Assistant (Poughkeepsie, NY; Fall 2015)
- Workday Inc. - Software Development Engineer Intern (Pleasanton, CA; Summer 2015)
Other Work
Much of the work I do in philosophy also relates computing, so if you are interested in the intersection between language, cognition, philosophy, and computers, definitely check the page out. Most of the philosophy paper are from my undergraduate years, and my experience since then has shed light on the shortfallings of these works. That being said, I think that is a positive observation, lest my intellectual development have stagnated!
Miscellaneous
- Email: Brendon BOLDT AT CompSci . Carnegie Mellon University . EDUcational institution (capital letters only)
- Links: GitHub, LinkedIn, Google Scholar, LTI @ CMU
- Tasteful website design and thoughtful content licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0