ABOUT
I'm a recent graduate of Brown University with a Master's in Computer Science. My passion is developing AI products to empower people. I bring experience in deep learning, NLP, and computer vision, and industry experience as a full-stack developer.
PUBLICATIONS
2020
OPENGPT-2: OPEN LANGUAGE MODELS AND IMPLICATIONS OF GENERATED TEXT
Vanya Cohen* and Aaron Gokaslan*. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students. Fall 2020 | Volume 27, No. 1.
Feature article that details the creation of OpenGPT-2 and the implications of large language models on research and society for a non-machine learning audience.
2019
GROUNDING LANGUAGE ATTRIBUTES TO OBJECTS USING BAYESIAN EIGENOBJECTS
Vanya Cohen*, Benjamin Burchfiel*, Thao Nguyen*, Nakul Gopalan, Stefanie Tellex, George Konidaris. IROS 2019.
Cohen et al. (2019) describes a model enabling robots to recognize household objects based on natural language descriptions. Notably the model generalizes to partially observed objects and novel viewpoints.
2019
OPENGPT-2: REPLICATING OPENAI’S BILLION-PARAMETER LANGUAGE MODEL
Aaron Gokaslan*, Vanya Cohen*, Ellie Pavlick, Stefanie Tellex. NeurIPS 2019: NewInML Workshop
Gokaslan and Cohen et al. (2019) describes the replication and release of open-source versions of the GPT-2 (Radford et al. 2019) language model and dataset, in a Google-sponsored project using peta-flop scale distributed training.
EXPERIENCE
BLACKBIRD.AI – MACHINE LEARNING ENGINEER
June 2020 - Present
Created machine learning solutions for tracking online disinformation and propaganda for government, corporate and NGO clients.
Created novel datasets and models for the analysis of coordinated malicious social content.
Consultant January-April 2019: Developed robust algorithms for language identification and open information
LUMINOSO TECHNOLOGIES – MACHINE LEARNING ENGINEER
Developed and deployed new algorithms for learning word representations in limited-data domains through transfer learning.
Created new features for ConceptNet, an MIT Media Lab common sense knowledge base corpus.
September 2019 - June 2020
BROWN U. ROBOTICS LAB – RESEARCH ASSISTANT
September 2017 - October 2019
First-authored papers, co-created OpenWebText Corpus, and advised on NLP models for lab publications and projects.
Mentored new students in deep learning, NLP, Mechanical Turk studies, and research methods.
UCLA/BROWN UNIVERSITY – RESEARCH ENGINEER
Created AWS applications for collecting and parsing millions of financial disclosure documents from governments and companies for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
December 2017 - November 2018
TRIPADVISOR – SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INTERN
Wrote performance oriented search features for the iOS maps and in-destination team.
Implemented a high-impact redesign of location-specific travel guides.
Finalist at the summer intern hackathon.
June 2016 - August 2016
EDUCATION
BROWN UNIVERSITY – MSC. COMPUTER SCIENCE
September 2017 - May 2018
Graduate coursework in Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, NLP, Theory of AI, and Computer Vision.
BROWN UNIVERSITY – BSC. COMPUTER SCIENCE
September 2013 - May 2017
Coursework in Systems, Embedded Software, Distributed Systems, Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, NLP, AI, Advanced Calculus, Linear Algebra, Theory of Computation, and Statistics.
SKILLS
LANGUAGES
Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, Swift, Objective-C, GLSL, C++, C, SQL, Lua, Scala
PLATFORMS
iOS, Linux, Windows, ROS, Arduino, AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, SNS, SQS, RDS), Google Cloud Platform, Tensorflow Research Cloud
TECHNOLOGIES
Pytorch, Tensorflow, CUDA, OpenGL, Matlab
CONTACT
vanya_cohen (at) alumni.brown.edu