Dillon Pulliam

I am helping to reimagine the future of mobility.

I joined the team.

I started my own company and attempted to bootstrap to profitability. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to scale quickly enough with one full-time founder (myself) and one 10-hour per week founder, and I shut down the business.

I learned many lessons and new skills.

I moved from working in the NLP space to focusing more heavily on ASR. Here I led the Universal-1 project, a SOTA ASR system. I also helped grow the research team and managed a team of researchers working across NLP, RL, and research engineering projects.

I joined a seed stage startup as employee #7 and individually built a number of zero-to-one products: Auto Chapters, Content Moderation, Summarization, and Topic Detection. This was before general-purpose and highly-performant LLMs. Here I executed across the entire ML stack including data sourcing, collection, labeling, and filtering, model architecture design and development, training and evaluation pipeline construction, and model training, benchmarking, and deployment.

I joined the Deep Learning team I interned with previously and researched NLP style models for binary vulnerability detection and analysis.

I received a MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and honed my skills as an AI researcher and engineer. I learned how to move up and down the AI/ML stack, leveraging my background in both high (software) and low (bare-metal) level computational concepts.

Here I conducted bare-metal AI/ML performance optimization research under Dr. Shawn Blanton in his Advanced Chip Test Laboratory (ACTL). I also interned twice at Northrop Grumman, working with FPGAs as a hardware engineer, and Deep Learning as a software engineer.

I received a BSc in Computer Engineering and a BSc in Computer Science, learning not only how computers are built, but also how to better program them. Here I also took my first AI/ML course and immediately knew this was the field I wanted to dive into further. Programming computers to solve certain tasks is extremely difficult, if not impossible, so why not teach them instead?

I planned to study Electrical Engineering, but after taking my first Computer Science course in the Fall of 2014 I became hooked on the ability to program computers. By the end of the course, I decided Computer Engineering was the way to go moving forward so as to blend my interest in Electrical Engineering and my newfound passion for Computer Science.