Hi, I’m Billy. I’m doing my PhD in computer science with Zoran Tiganj at Indiana University, focusing on deep learning and natural language processing.
My current research involves:
- Long-context modeling
- Efficient attention
- Downstream evaluation of large multimodal models
- In-context learning & interpretability
I’m also interested in:
- Infrastructure for training on lots and lots and lots of gpus (e.g., ultrascale-playbook, and BLOOM)
I did my master’s in computational linguistics at Indiana University with Damir Cavar in the NLP Lab, and before that I did my bachelor’s at Michigan State University where I studied linguistics, TESOL, Chinese, and Korean, and did a summer language program at Harbin Institute of Technology.
Publications:
[pdf] [website] [code] Dickson, B., Maini, S. S., Nosofsky, R., & Tiganj, Z. (accepted with minor revisions). Comparing Perceptual Judgments in Large Multimodal Models and Humans. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/pcmrj
Posters:
[pdf] Dickson, B., Maini, S. S., & Tiganj, Z. (2024). Comparing LLMs and Cognitive Models of Memory [Poster presentation]. Midwest Speech & Language Days, Ann Arbor, MI, United States.
[pdf] Dickson, B., Maini, S. S., Nosofsky, R., & Tiganj, Z. (2024). Comparing perceptual judgments in large multimodal models and humans [Poster presentation]. Midwest Computer Vision Workshop, Bloomington, IN, United States.
Teaching:
Summer 2024, Generative AI and Symbolic Knowledge Representations: Large Language Models, Knowledge, and Reasoning (ESSLLI 2024, Leuven, Belgium)
Spring 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025 Associate Instructor, Data Mining (Indiana University)
Spring 2020, Adult Communicative Focused English (Michigan State University)