Eric Bolton
ML Engineer & Computational Journalist | Creator of aiportrait.wsj.com | Writer on Substack
I'm the co-founder of Spherical Harmonics, a nonprofit building open-source tools that help communities design safer streets.
I also build ML systems for content recommendation and ranking, information retrieval, and text generation at scale. Most recently at Meta, I shipped multimodal models for Instagram Reels ranking, and built recommender systems from scratch serving hundreds of millions of users a day.
Before that, I was CTO at NewsWyze (building RAG pipelines that cut editorial processing time by 85 percent), founding engineer at Applied XL (finetuning data-to-text LLMs that surfaced investment opportunities for biotech funds), and ML scientist at the Wall Street Journal (building information retrieval systems and the GAN-based AI Portraits app).
I'm particularly fascinated by how AI can transform the way information flows between cultures and across languages. If you're curious about this too, or working on similar challenges in journalism and content distribution, 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.