Eric Bolton
Software Engineer at Meta | Computational Journalist | Creator of aiportrait.wsj.com
I'm an ML engineer at Instagram building recommendation and trend detection systems. My work spans time-sensitive content relevance modeling, LLM evaluation frameworks, and real-time topic expansion infrastructure.
Previously, I was CTO at NewsWyze, building multilingual AI tools for international newsrooms, and a founding engineer at Applied XL, deploying data-to-text LLMs at scale. Before that, I built ML-driven recommender systems at Columbia's Local News Lab and NLP and computer vision systems at the Wall Street Journal's R&D lab.
I'm passionate about ways AI can improve the exchange of knowledge and information between humans. If you're working on similar challenges, I'd love to chat.
Projects
- Frontier Beat: An AI-powered platform that tracks and summarizes trending research papers from ArXiv and their associated GitHub repositories.
- Show me the Ballot!: A web app that helps first-time voters preview their ballot information, making voting information more accessible and less intimidating.
- Machine Thoughts: An early demonstration of how language models can generate convincing human conversation, foreshadowing current concerns about AI-driven disinformation and presented at C+J 2021.
- Last Minute Moneyball: Analysis of voting power distribution in the US, using polling data to calculate dollar value (in federal funding impact) of votes across different jurisdictions.
- Brexit Coverage Map: Interactive visualization using Doc2Vec embeddings to compare Brexit coverage across British newspapers, revealing partisan lean. Link to write-up.
- Beating Dots: A*-algorithm agent that achieved a perfect score in Dots in under 100 tries, the only known perfect score achieved in the game, per the leaderboard.
Articles & Publications
- High Quality Real-Time Structured Debate Generation: AI debate generation using tree-structured data from Kialo, reaching near-human performance through a novel augmentation strategy: concatenating "Pro" argument chains in the debate tree.
- Talk2020 Retrieves and Analyzes 30 Years of Candidate Statements: Database and search tool built for the Wall Street Journal, enabling analyses that revealed unique linguistic patterns and topic preferences among presidential candidates.
- A Decade of News: How the Big Stories Evolved: Analysis using Word2Vec to track the evolution of public figures' media portrayal over time, including dramatic shifts in perception of key political figures.
- What's in a Hedcut? Depends How It's Made: Innovative AI system for generating the Wall Street Journal's iconic stipple portraits, with special focus on improving representation through AI-augmented training data.
Blogs
- Candid Selfie: A semi-periodic snapshot of where my head is at. New posts every Sunday.
- Aligned Foresight: Data-driven reporting on superforecasting, AI, politics, and society, focused on measuring public opinion and predicting how it will evolve.