Welcome to the webpage of
D. Estes McKnight!

About

Who Am I?

I'm a freelance software and machine learning developer with over four years of full-time experience in ML research labs, working both as an AI researcher and an ML software engineer. I've developed ML educational content and retrieval-augmented generation on contracts and worked internships across the stack.

I completed my research-based master's degree in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, specializing in machine learning and natural language processing under Dr. Alona Fyshe. My thesis focused on age-related differences in object similarity using interpretable neural embeddings, and it is available here. Before moving to Edmonton, I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Oklahoma, earning a dual degree in Mathematics and Computer Engineering + Computer Science. Along the way, I served as head of OU's mathematics and competitive programming organizations and as president of the University of Alberta's Computer Science Graduate Students’ Association.

In ye olden times, I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.

My hobbies include reading about languages, playing games with friends, and reading about games in a variety of senses (which, for better or for worse, seems to happen more often than actually playing them nowadays). A niche interest of mine is video game music, including listening to it, organizing interest in it/its composers, and archiving it. Hit me up for some recommendations, if you so desire! My favorite soundtracks are those of Chrono Trigger (Yasunori Mitsuda) and Radiant Historia (Yoko Shimomura, of Kingdom Hearts fame); I'm also a big fan of a variety of more obscure stuff, though (check out this SNES track from Dean Evans)!