Hey hey it's your birthday
Feb. 9, 2025
Today I'm 46 and it is time for another update. I've been working for the last year at Notre Dame on a few different projects. My primary focus has been MEWS (Misinformation Early Warning System). It uses AI to analyze social media in southeast asian in search of CCP propaganda. It is an interesting and valuable project that tries to protect American interests. However, it was funded by USAID so now it is dead. I thought this project would be resilient to the change in administration since it was started the last time Trump was President, but apparently he has changed his mind or at least decided to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is depressing for me but it is much worse for the 10,000+ employees of USAID who had spent their careers serving this organization and its mission and have been tossed thanklessly aside.
Aside from that project, I've been working on a cool project that seeks to evaluate how well humans and AIs can work together in disaster scenarios. I built a simulation engine that essentially lets LLMs play a text adventure game and evaluate their performance.
I'm also teaching a class called High-Frequency Trading Technologies. For that, I built a toy exchange and put together a lab to run it. I'm finally making my exchange software public. You can find it here: https://github.com/matthewbelcher/NDFEX/. PRs welcome!
So far I would say I got what I was looking for in the career switch. I've been able to play with some fun new toys and done some good for the world at the same time.