cv
A brief CV of my academic and professional experience.
Basics
Name | Dan DeGenaro |
Label | Graduate Student |
drd92@georgetown.edu | |
Url | https://ddegenaro.github.io/ |
Summary | Incoming PhD student at Georgetown studying computer science with a focus on multimodal systems. |
Work
-
2024.06 - 2024.08 Visiting Scholar
Johns Hopkins University
Participated in the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence SCALE 2024 workshop.
- Developed a novel technique using downstream retrieval systems to produce preference rankings. Fine-tuned LLM using reinforcement learning to produce more retrievable document summaries.
-
2024.05 - 2024.08 MITES Semester Instructor
MIT
Developed and taught a course in machine learning, data science, natural language processing, and computer vision.
- Received rave reviews from students and supervisors alike. Re-hired for summer 2025.
-
2023.08 - Present Graduate Teaching Fellow
Georgetown University
Teaching assistant for the following courses: Introduction to Data Analytics (graduate), Computer Vision (graduate), Deep Learning (graduate), and Deep Learning (undergraduate).
- Awarded the Graduate Student Teaching Award for 2024.
-
2022.05 - 2022.08 Undergraduate Researcher
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Developed a novel technique for the distillation of a multilingual BERT model into a smaller model.
Volunteer
-
2024.08 - 2025.05 Washington, DC
Treasurer
Graduate Linguistics Student Association
Treasurer for the GLSA, responsible for managing the budget and organizing events.
- Organized some workshops and social events.
Education
-
2025.08 - 2030.05 Washington, DC
-
2023.08 - 2025.05 Washington, DC
MS
Georgetown University
Computational Linguistics
- Deep Learning
- Corpus Linguistics
- Multilingual NLP
- Machine Learning
- NLP
- Databases
- Hypothesis Testing and R
- Historical Linguistics
-
2019.09 - 2023.05 Amherst, MA
BS
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Applied Mathematics
- Calculus I-III
- Linear Algebra
- Differential Equations
- Probability and Statistics
- Linear Optimization
- Numerical Analysis
- Chaos Theory
-
2019.09 - 2023.05 Amherst, MA
BS
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Physics
- Quantum Mechanics I-II
- Electrodynamics
- Statistical Mechanics
- Thermodynamics
- Classical Mechanics
- Computational Physics
-
2019.09 - 2023.05 Amherst, MA
BA
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Linguistics
- NLP I-III
- Sociolinguistics
- African-American English
- Phonetics
- Phonology
- Syntax
- Semantics
Awards
- 2024
Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award
Georgetown University
This award recognizes excellence among graduate students serving as TAs. Awards are given to one student from each area: humanities, social science and science and an at-large award.
- 2023
Summa Cum Laude
University of Massachusetts Amherst
- 2022
LeRoy F. Cook, Jr. Memorial Scholarship
Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Awarded for academic excellence in physics and for engaging in teaching/tutoring as an undergraduate.
- 2019 through 2023
- 2019 through 2023
Thomas J. Watson Memorial Scholarship
IBM Thomas J. Watson Foundation
Awarded for academic excellence.
- 2019 through 2023
Publications
-
2025 MMMORRF: Multimodal Multilingual Modularized Reciprocal Rank Fusion
To appear at SIGIR 2025 as a demo paper
We found that a pipeline approach composed of modality-specialized systems out-performed advanced multimodal models on some video retrieval tasks.
-
2024 Experiments in mamba sequence modeling and nllb-200 fine-tuning for low resource multilingual machine translation
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP 2024)
With a fellow student, I developed a state-of-the-art machine translation system for indigenous languages of the Americas, winning 2nd place in this shared task competition.
Skills
Python |
R |
Java |
SQL |
MATLAB |
HTML/CSS |
C |
JavaScript |
PyTorch |
TensorFlow |
Data Science |
Git/GitHub |
AWS |
Linux |
Docker |
Windows |
Slurm/SGE |
LaTeX |
Machine Learning |
Deep Learning |
NLP |
Computer Vision |
Languages
English | |
Native speaker |
Spanish | |
Conversational |
French | |
Conversational |
Russian | |
Conversational |
German | |
Beginner |
Interests
Computational Linguistics and NLP | |
Information Theory | |
Language Modeling | |
LLMs | |
Tokenization | |
Machine Translation | |
Low-Resource Languages | |
Multilingual NLP | |
NLP | |
Computational Linguistics | |
Corpus Linguistics | |
Historical Linguistics | |
Sociolinguistics | |
Automatic Speech Recognition |
Computer Vision and Multimodal Systems | |
Computer Vision | |
Multimodal Systems | |
Machine Learning | |
Deep Learning | |
Image Processing | |
Video Processing | |
Machine Unlearning | |
Diffusion Models | |
Immunization | |
AI Safety | |
AI Ethics | |
Reinforcement Learning |