Niall Dalton

Niall Dalton

I write code and think about stuff.

About Me

Currently, I am an Applied AI Engineer at Scale AI. I like physics, technology, and philosophy. Previously, I worked at Amazon on embedded software for Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation. I also did research and ML projects at Activ Surgical, Northeastern University, and MIT Lincoln Lab.

If you're interested, here is my resume. Better yet, here is a picture of my dog.

Here are a random assortment of things I find interesting:

Projects

AMPED: Advantaged Markov Proxy Evolution Dynamics

A a novel deep RL algorithm that generalizes MuZero to n-th order Markov chains and combines the PPO objective with the MuZero objective for better generalization.

Scientific Truths Are Not Self Evident: Science, Perception, and Identity in America

Analyzed cultural perceptions of science with NLP techniques and big (Twitter) data and determined that science is often perceived as a narrative rather than a set of truisms.

Shifting Morals: A Study in Probabilistic Machine Ethics

Shifting Morals is a thought experiment inspired by MIT's Moral Machine. However, instead of deterministic outcomes, Shifting Morals posits that outcomes are probabilistic and that everything is up to chance.

Experience

Scale AI

Applied AI Engineer, June 2024 - Present

Amazon: Project Kuiper

Software Engineer II, July 2023 - June 2024

Amazon: Project Kuiper

Software Engineer I, September 2021 - July 2023

Activ Surgical

Machine Learning Intern, January 2021 - May 2021

Skills

Languages & Frameworks

Python, Rust, C/C++, Bash, PyTorch, Java, NumPy, Pandas, TensorFlow, FreeRTOS, ARM, MATLAB, Sci-Py, CUDA, Django, etc.

Other

AWS (S3, Lambda, EC2, DynamoDB, etc.), Docker, Vim, Git, Linux, GCP, ML / DL, Scrum, CICD, etc.

Latest Posts

Evaluating Long-Term Ethical Decision-Making Capabilities of Reasoning LLMs

How does chain-of-thought reasoning affect ethical decision making in LLMs?

Axiomatic Rights, Observational Equivalence, and the Meta-Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

What does it mean for our rights to be axiomatic? What about an AI's right?