John Kirchenbauer

In Tom Goldstein’s lab at the University of Maryland, I spent the first part of my PhD working on techniques to discern whether the thing you’re currently reading or looking at was created by a human or generated by an AI system. With the release of ChatGPT in 2022, all of a sudden, that became a very practical challenge.

Generally, my research has explored various aspects of deep learning for discrete data types like natural language and graphs. I am motivated by the belief that attempting to teach machines to understand and generate natural language (and sometimes failing) is a good way to learn more about what the real building blocks of general intelligence are along the way. Specifically, one question I've been focused on recently is determining whether the impressive progress in language modeling over the past few years is simply the result of web-scale memorization, or indicates the actual emergence of reasoning and cognition abilities in transformer-based deep learning systems.

Before starting my PhD at UMD, I worked at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a research engineer (FFRDC). I completed my MS and BS in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis in 2020 and I received a diploma in Violin from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music in 2017. When I’m not doing research, I like being in the mountains, and listening to Mahler.