Dave Hillman
consultant ~ developer
Filling our lives with big things leaves less for the little things that may mean more.
Work smarter, not harder!
It's always darkest before it goes pitch black.
Located somewhere under the clear blue skys of North Carolina.
Worked most of my life as a software engineer...now I spend my days figuring out things I never had time for when I was working.
Taught technology (programming, web...) courses at The Johns Hopkins University for over 20 years.
Wrote a book, magazine articles. Focused on blogging (for now).
USAF Veteran!
Backgound in...
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering (waterfall and agile)
Project Management
Data Engineering, and
spoiling my granddaughter.
Projects...
< Localized LLMs >
Localized Large Language Models (LLMs) are computational models that mimic how text is understood and used to simulate human intelligence.
Identify and evaluate LLMs for definitions, categorization, and summarization...running on localized CPU-based architectures.
ChatGPT and cloud-based LLMs are hardware resource intensive. Running LLMs on local machines means you're not subject to being connected all the time, have more privacy, and have the flexibility to change models as they improve.
Capabilities include categorization, document summarization, keyword extraction, definition generator, and question/response.
Latest efforts: trying to find a "sweet spot" commercial LLM that does most things, if not all, very well.
Technologies used
- LLMs
- Python
- LLM Support Libraries
- Web Stack
< Enhanced Entity Attribute Value (EEAV) >
EEAV is a very flexible model for capturing and exploiting data sets.
EEAV focuses on data-driven application development.
Starting with a table of data (CSV, JSON), ingest it, then manipulate it for a variety of pruposes. Any 2-dimensional data set can be captured in 3 tables: dataset, attributes, and values.
A secondary aspect of this effort is a web-based environment that makes it easily accessible and available.
Latest efforts: the REST interface is pretty much completed, documenting it all now.
Technologies used
- Python
- Web Stack
- Postgres, SQLite
- JavaScript, HTML, CSS
- Tabulator (table viewer)
Thesis I never wrote...
My favorite class in college was "The History of Computing". I really liked the narrative of how things came to be.
I've started a project to write a thesis, maybe a book, on computing technology over the past 70 years. The goal is to expose the relationships between computing technologies such as programming languages, microprocessors, data, and AI to each other and how they impact people, culture, and economics.
I've settled on 21 technologies, with some overlap, for my initial effort; also looking at a reasonable way to describe the world from the early 1950s to the present. The key is to identify the things that mattered and how they mattered.