Wesley Welch, Developer in Brandon, MS, United States
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Wesley Welch

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Machine Learning Developer

Location
Brandon, MS, United States
Toptal Member Since
May 1, 2020

After falling in love with statistics in college, Wesley learned Python as a means to facilitate his yearning to use data to answer questions. This has snowballed into his role as a data analyst for an insurance company and a software engineer specializing in machine learning for a risk-management startup. In both roles, he was given a blank slate to create novel solutions to myriad problems, and he sincerely enjoyed it. Wesley thrives in an environment where no two days are exactly the same.

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Windows, Compass, MongoDB, MySQL Workbench, Postman, Jira, Trello, Slack, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Git, MacOS, Windows 10

The most amazing...

...thing I've developed was an anomaly detection application that compared users to national text/image data from social media sites and public databases.

Work Experience

Machine Learning Engineer

2019 - 2020
GoodLight, Inc
  • Developed a full-stack web application, “Risk EKG,” that gathered data from across the US and allowed users to compare their company’s personnel risk to their industry and location visually.
  • Used data-driven approaches to create novel proprietary algorithms that allowed users to calculate a person’s risk across several categories based on publicly available data.
  • Designed and executed all phases of ML model creation, from data collection and cleaning, to feature generation, to parameter optimization, to implementation of working models for internal and external use.
  • Created a DBSCAN based anomaly detection framework that was feature agnostic and implemented it as an internal API, which allowed employees across the company to perform anomaly detection on a myriad of data sources.
  • Developed an LSTM Neural Network for hate speech detection in social media posts, and later expanded the functionality to include sentiment analysis, potential crime detection, and harassment detection.
  • Created a convolutional neural network that predicted income for individuals based on their assets (vehicles and properties) and used this prediction compared to actual or estimated income to determine the risk of dubious financial practices.
  • Built a Gaussian mixture model that was feature agnostic to perform entity resolution of personal information such as demographics, addresses, and court cases.
  • Built natural language processing models trained on context and syntax to identify novel words in social media posts that might be slang or misspelled references to keywords, which gave a more robust keyword detection than using a stored vocabulary.
Technologies: React, JavaScript, TensorFlow, Keras, Flask, Python

Founder & CEO

2014 - 2020
Stellar Futures
  • Used Tkinter to and Electron to create a desktop application, “Evolve ACT”, that allowed students to learn topics from the ACT at their own pace, track their improvement, and explore weaknesses to improve performance.
  • Built a website landing page using Flask for selling the Evolve ACT product that integrated login capabilities as well as OAuth, utilized a MySQL database, and used Redux to cache user information and progress.
  • Built relationships with educational leaders across the southeastern US in order to provide educational enrichment to students for standardized testing.
  • Recorded and edited video explanations for every question type and difficulty for ACT test strategies.
Technologies: MySQL, JavaScript, React, Python

Provider Reimbursement Data Analyst

2017 - 2019
Blue Cross Blue Shield of MS
  • Prepared reports and made inferences about client behavior to inform company decisions through the use of SAS and SQL programming.
  • Used a combination of actuarial science, statistical analysis, and industry research to determine appropriate prices for novel or updated health care procedures.
  • Developed a web crawler using BeautifulSoup and Selenium in order to automatically aggregate research and information about health care procedures and providers.
  • Automatically paraphrased lengthy research articles published by Medicare and other government entities into 1-2 page summaries with the use of natural language processing.
  • Automated hundreds of manual tasks in Microsoft Excel with Excel VBA and saved my team hundreds of man-hours. One example included taking one column of data thousands of rows long and dividing it equally into 12 columns.
  • Created a GUI dashboard with Tkinter for internal company use that aggregated insurance claim data from across the entire state and present clinic comparisons which significantly improved negotiation power with health care providers.
Technologies: Excel VBA, SAS, MySQL

Crypto Prediction Trading Bot

A Python-based app for cryptocurrency trading. The app uses an LSTM based time-series neural network model to predict prices for cryptocurrency. Using these predictions, the algorithm automatically buys and sells from the available offers of the currency while also implementing stop-loss measures. The application is housed in a Flask website that allows users to log in and add their own money to the investment fund.

Evolve ACT

A Python-based web application that allows students to learn topics from the ACT at their own pace, track their improvement, and explore weaknesses to improve performance. The application is a Flask website that allows users to create accounts and practice ACT questions by subject, category, and difficulty. The site provides users the ability to try questions on their own, view hints, see solutions, and watch video solutions.

Libraries/APIs

Flask-RESTful, TensorFlow, Keras, React

Paradigms

Anomaly Detection

Storage

MySQL, MongoDB

Other

Machine Learning, Time Series Analysis, Computer Vision, Web App Deployment, Windows 10, Dashboards

Languages

HTML5, CSS2, Python, JavaScript, SAS, Excel VBA, SCSS

Frameworks

Flask, Compass, Electron, Bootstrap

Tools

Slack, Trello, Jira, Postman, MySQL Workbench, Git, Figma

Platforms

MacOS, Windows, Visual Studio Code (VS Code)

2017 - 2019

Master's Degree in Computer Science: Data Analysis

Duke University - Durham, NC

2009 - 2014

Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry

Harvard University - Cambridge, MA

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