Howdy!

Myself sitting on a table with my short curly hair, nerdy glasses, and a dark grey polo shirt on. Behind me is a whiteboard with some diagrams written on it. I am looking directly into the camera with a slight smirk on my face.

I am a nerd.

Well hello there. My name's Nathan Cooper. Right now, I am an R&D Engineer at Answer AI. I get to do a lot of cool random stuff, but mostly what I focus on is using AI to help boost productivity in software development. The thing that I'm probably most internet famous for is leading a hackathon project to create an open-source version of GitHub Copilot. We ended up completely failing, but it was one of the most fun experiences that I had working with a ton of community members, especially two people, Reshinth and Erfan, who I'm still friends with today and have had been lucky enough to call colleagues.

A lifetime ago I got my PhD from the College of William & Mary in computer science. My dissertation was at the intersection of software engineering and AI. One of the things that I am very happy with from my PhD was I didn't only focus on coding, I did a lot of computer vision as well. The first project that I led was a fun project called Tango. We used computer vision to compare the similarity between two videos of bug reports in mobile apps. We would then use these similarity scores to rank how similar a new bug report svideo was to existing ones in order to determine if they were duplicates. My PhD advisor was Dr. Denys Poshyvanyk, and he taught me a lot about how to be a professional academic. I owe a lot of my success to him. We also hit the jackpot in terms of timing with all of the huge progress that deep learning was having in natural language processing and computer vision. This made my PhD experience, while stressful and probably the hardest thing I've done in my life due to personal circumstances, an incredibly fun and exciting time of my life.

Hobbies

I really enjoy programming, and so one of my hobbies is mobile and web development. I've created quite a few mobile apps. One of them surprisingly did something very similar to the new Notebook LM from Google - it would take a PDF and convert it into a fun podcast. If you wanna look at some of these projects, you can go to my project page to find all the hopefully completed ones.

My self-dancing With a woman. I'm wearing a dark navy blue overshirt with a white undershirt. You can see that I'm wearing a necklace with a wolf pendant attached to it. My pants are black jeans and I have white sneakers on. The woman is wearing white shorts and a beige blouse.

These days, outside of my digital life, you can catch me on the dance floor. I've been learning salsa and bachata since the start of 2024 and having a blast. Not only is it a fun activity to be able to have in my back pocket, but you also get to meet incredible people and make great friends. #SalsaIsLife

Causes I Care About

Education is something very near and dear to me. I owe a lot of my success to the amazing teachers who mentored me throughout my life. The most important, which of course is my mom who I owe basically everything to. The main reason why I decided to get my Ph.D. was due to one of my undergrad advisors allowing me to do research with him on how to structure software engineering courses to help students learn more effectively. While I took a different path from wanting to become a professor, I still hold academia and our education system in high regard. I believe the next generation of educational tools, such as Cod Academy and edX platforms, and the new ones that are to come from AI are going to democratize knowledge and make for a better world. I hope I can play a pivotal role in that future.

The next biggest cause for me is on helping children who are the most innocent in our world and yet are suffering from some of the most painful and cruel injustices that can possibly exist. Many children unfortunately face the reality of abuse. The scale and horror of the problem is difficult to comprehend which means we as a society tend to not want to talk about it enough. However, for our children's sakes we must and we must end it. I highly encourage people to learn more about this. One of the most beautiful companies with the most beautiful mission that I know of is called Thorn. Their CEO Julie Cordua has an incredibly powerful TED Talk that discusses their mission and the problem that I encourage you all to watch: Ted Talk. I also encourage you to donate if you are able to: thorn.org/donate. Similarly, I hope that I can play a role in shaping the future that Julie Cordova and many other people envision for our children.