About
I’m a research scientist focused on natural language processing and multimodal applications of transformers. I currently work at Primer, a startup focused on bringing NLP-enhanced tools to national intelligence and defense. My research interests are broad, but lately I am especially excited by information embedding and retrieval, relation extraction and growing knowledge bases, and data efficient methods.
My prior experiences are diverse, and I’m lucky to have collaborated with many talented economists, statisticians, computer scientists, and physicists. I pursued a Master’s in Statistics at Stanford from 2019-2021, where I got involved with research in the Stanford AI Lab creating editable language models and with economists measuring the causal impact of automation on wages. I worked at Hudson River Trading, an algorithmic trading firm, for three years, automating trade settlement and cash management and analyzing factors contributing to returns. Out of college, I worked in economic consulting at Berkeley Research Group, building damages models under economists and industry experts that were used to resolve contractual disputes.
I’m a self-taught programmer and a fan of economics blogs, Fed watching, Russian lit, running, and bay-area hiking.
Contact
spencer (dot) braun (at) gmail (dot) com