Ian Whalen

Background

About Ian Whalen

Interests: predictive modeling, optimization, evolutionary computation, fair and explainable AI, object oriented programming, formal mathematics, analytics transformations, research and developmentBased in Chicago, working as a data scientist at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey.I currently tech lead the QuantumBlack Labs R&D function. A group focused on incubating new software assets to accelerate client work and doing fundamental research on new topics. I have developed foundational approaches to control optimization, energy trading, and a slew of GenAI / LLM approaches to various business cases. My experience with language models spans multi-modal, traditional NLP, chatbot, RAG, agentic applications, and more.I began my journey in industry prototyping and deploying machine learning solutions to complex problems. I have experience across many sectors including energy, mining, aerospace, medtech, and non-profit organizations.I received my MSc from Michigan State University in Computer Science. During my time in academia, I studied evolutionary computation and its application to machine learning problems such as high dimensional feature selection and neural architecture search. I still have a soft spot for all things involving evolutionary algorithms or artificial life.