Ethan Heavey

Background

About Ethan Heavey

I'm studying my PhD at the University of New Brunswick, with a focus on small language models, retrieval augmeented generation, and language model power efficiency vs perfromance trade-offs. I’m fascinated by how computers understand and interpret natural language and the incredible advancements within the natural language processing field. While pursuing my MSc at St. Francis Xavier University, I focused on dialogue systems and retrieval augmented generation. For my thesis I built a dialogue system that leverages generative AI (with a few other components sprinkled in) to impersonate fictitious characters. In my undergraduate degree I developed an end-to-end evolutionary computation program to evolve 3D shapes. I'm interested in state of the art machine learning techniques (with an intense focus on natural language processing ones), and game development. When I'm not working on a side project, I love to mountain bike, trail run, and play video games in my spare time. I'm always excited to meet new people or talk about anything from penguins to perplexity. If you have any questions about me or past work, don't hesitate to reach out!