Jon Saad-Falcon

Education

June 2023 - June 2027

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

- Overall GPA - 4.00/4.00, Focus on Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and ML Systems

- GEM Fellowship and EDGE Fellowship

Aug. 2018 — May 2022

B.S. - M.S. Program in Computer Science, Minors in Linguistics and Mathematics

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

- Overall GPA - 3.96/4.00, Concentrations in Intelligence and Theory

- Stamps President's Scholar, Honors Program, Tapia Scholarship, and U.N. Millennium Fellowship

- Undergraduate Research Thesis - PeopleMap, NLP and Visualization Tool for Mapping Out Researchers

Summer 2019

Berlin Summer Program

Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

Exchange program with classes in Machine Learning, Agile Product Development, Statistics/Probability, and Entrepreneurship.

Academic Research Experience

Aug. 2022 - May 2023

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Research Assistant, Natural Language Processing Group

Mentor: Christopher Potts, Matei Zaharia

Exploring domain adaptive techniques for information retrieval models to improve zero and few-shot accuracy

Summer 2021

Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA (remote)

Research Intern, Stanford AI Lab, Natural Language Processing Group

Mentor: Christopher Potts, Matei Zaharia

Accepted for a cohort of 12 students out of 723 applicants. Constructing new benchmark dataset for naturalistic, technical question-answering models.

Aug. 2019 — May 2022

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

Undergraduate Research Assistant, Polo Club of Data Science

Advisor: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau

Projects focusing machine learning and data visualization.

Aug. 2019 — May 2022

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

Undergraduate Research Assistant, Speech and Language Technologies Laboratory

Advisor: Diyi Yang

Projects focusing natural language processing and computational social science.

Industry Research Experience

Aug. 2023 - Sep. 2023

Databricks, San Francisco, CA

ML Research / Engineering Intern,

Mentor: Matei Zaharia

Leveraged statistical inference strategies to create novel automated evaluation system for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Aug. 2021 - Aug. 2022

Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), Seattle, WA (remote)

Predoctoral Young Investigator, Semantic Scholar

Mentor: Doug Downey

Designed new efficiency techniques for caching and reusing sequence representations in language models.

Spring 2021

Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), Seattle, WA (remote)

Research Intern, Semantic Scholar

Mentor: Dan Weld, Tom Hope

Constructed search engine for exploring of challenges and future directions within COVID-19 literature. Collaborated with 10+ medical professionals to design better tools for assisting scientific research.

Summer 2020

Goldman Sachs, New York City, NY (remote)

Research Analyst, Global Investment Research

Mentor: Michael Lapides

Initiated an independent project using quantitative techniques and NLP tools to perform valuation of companies. Collaborated with traders and external clients to develop reliable Python tools for extending coverage of sectors.

Honors and Awards

2018 - 2022

Stamps President’s Scholarship, Georgia Tech

Premier full-ride scholarship given to 40 undergraduate students out of 30,000 applicants to Georgia Tech

Spring 2022

Fulbright Scholarship, Research Award, Germany

Awarded to top U.S. students interested in research and cultural exchange abroad

Spring 2023

Gates-Cambridge Scholarship, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Full-ride graduate scholarship awarded to 75 scholars out of more than 6,000 applicants worldwide

Spring 2022

Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, Finalist, Stanford

Full-ride graduate scholarship awarded for academic excellence, leadership, and civic engagement

Summer 2021

Donald V. Jackson Fellowship, Georgia Tech College of Computing

Awarded to well-rounded, first-year master’s student who embodies values of academic excellence and leadership

Spring 2021

Computer Science Research Mentorship Program, Google

Apprenticeship program for matching university students with mentors in Google Research

Fall 2021

U.N. Millennium Fellowship, United Nations

Semester-long leadership development program for supporting student leaders whose organizations address the UN Academic Impact Principles.

Fall 2020

President's Undergraduate Research Award (PURA)

$1,500 award to support undergraduate research with Georgia Tech faculty advisor

Summer 2020

Pathways to Graduate School for Rising College Seniors, Princeton University

Competitive program designed to prepare students for graduate school applications

Summer 2020

Oxford Machine Learning Summer School, Oxford University

Competitive two-week summer school for researchers and engineers in academia and industry

Spring 2020

Citadel Securities Trading Challenge, Citadel Securities

Placed first out of 26 competing teams in simulated trading challenge at Georgia Tech competition

Publications

Benchmarking and Building Long-Context Retrieval Models with LoCo and M2-BERT

Jon Saad-Falcon, Daniel Y. Fu, Simran Arora, Neel Guha, Christopher Ré

ICML. 2024.

Project PDF Code

ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Jon Saad-Falcon, Omar Khattab, Christopher Potts, Matei Zaharia

NAACL. 2024.

Project PDF Code

UDAPDR: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via LLM Prompting and Distillation of Rerankers

Jon Saad-Falcon, Omar Khattab, Keshav Santhanam, Radu Florian, Martin Franz, Salim Roukos, Avirup Sil, Md Arafat Sultan, Christopher Potts

EMNLP. 2023.

Project PDF Code

Moving Beyond Downstream Task Accuracy for Information Retrieval Benchmarking

Keshav Santhanam*, Jon Saad-Falcon*, Martin Franz, Omar Khattab, Avirup Sil, Radu Florian, Md Arafat Sulton, Salim Roukos, Matei Zaharia, Christopher Potts

ACL Findings. 2023.

Project PDF Code

Embedding Recycling for Language Models

Jon Saad-Falcon, Amanpreet Singh, Luca Soldaini, Michael D'Arcy, Arman Cohan, Doug Downey

EACL. 2023.

Project PDF Code

ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction

Keshav Santhanam*, Omar Khattab*, Jon Saad-Falcon, Christopher Potts, Matei Zaharia

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). 2022.

Project PDF Code

A Search Engine for Discovery of Scientific Challenges and Directions

Dan Lahav, Jon Saad-Falcon, Bailey Kuehl, Sophie Johnson, Sravanthi Parasa, Noam Shomron, Duen Horng Chau, Diyi Yang, Eric Horvitz, Daniel S. Weld, Tom Hope

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 2022.

Project Demo PDF Code Oral Presentation

Argo Scholar: Interactive Visual Exploration of Literature in Browsers

Kevin Li, Haoyang Yang, Anish Upadhayay, Zhiyan Zhou, Jon Saad-Falcon, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau

IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2021.

Project PDF Video Best Poster, Honorable Mention

Large-Scale Analysis of Career Transitions: The Impact of Human Capital, Job History, and Language Factors

Austin P Wright, Caleb Ziems, Haekyu Park, Jon Saad-Falcon, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Diyi Yang, Maria Tomprou

Pre-print. 2021.

Project PDF

EnergyVis: Interactively Tracking and Exploring Energy Consumption for ML Models

Omar Shaikh, Jon Saad-Falcon, Austin P Wright, Nilaksh Das, Scott Freitas, Omar Isaac Asensio, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau

CHI '21 Extended Abstracts (CHI LBW). 2021.

Project PDF Video

Examining the Ordering of Rhetorical Strategies in Persuasive Requests

Omar Shaikh, Jiaao Chen, Jon Saad-Falcon, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau, Diyi Yang

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP Findings). 2020.

Project PDF Video Code

Mapping Researchers with PeopleMap

Jon Saad-Falcon, Omar Shaikh, Zijie J. Wang, Austin P. Wright, Sasha Richardson, Duen Horng (Polo) Chau

IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2020.

Project Demo PDF Code Best Poster, Honorable Mention

Press

Apr. 2021

"This New Tool Can Track the Environmental Cost of Your Machine Learning Model," Georgia Tech, College of Computing

Nov. 2020

"Being Polite Can Be Essential to Getting a Loan," Georgia Tech, College of Computing

Oct. 2020

"Georgia Tech Researchers Contribute 13 Papers to Premier Visualization Conference," Georgia Tech, College of Computing

Service

Conference Volunteering

Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2022

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2020

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2020

Institutional Volunteering

January 2021 — May 2022

Georgia Tech Venture Capital Fund,

Co-founder and Student Director,

Raising an inaugural multi-million early-stage fund to begin supporting Georgia Tech startups by Spring 2022. Created educational curriculum for teaching 40+ students on the fundamental strategies of venture capital funds

July 2020 — May 2022

Computer Science Outreach Club,

Founding Member and Volunteer,

Develop coding workshops and lectures to teach underprivileged youth from Atlanta-area highschools. Assist students in their college application process as well as guide their preparation for summer internships.

Aug. 2019 — May 2021

Georgia Tech Investments Committee,

Research Analyst, Fixed Income Sector

Collaborate with fellow analysts to research sector trends, hedge investments, and determine market signals. Assist in developing forecasts and recommendations for a portfolio worth over $1.4 million.