James Sharpnack

James Sharpnack

Staff AI Research Scientist
Duolingo
Former Associate Professor
UC Davis Statistics Department
Research Impact: 10 PhD Students Graduated • 43+ Publications • AI in Education Innovator • COVID-19 Public Health Response Leader

Research Areas

🎓 Educational AI & Assessment

Duolingo English Test • Computerized Adaptive Testing • LLM Cheating Detection

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🦠 Public Health & Epidemiology

COVID-19 Response • Wastewater Surveillance • PNAS Publications

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🌌 Astronomical Discovery

Gravitational Lens Detection • Unsupervised Learning

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🏢 Industry-Scale ML

Duolingo Monetization AI • Amazon Search • Recommendation Systems • Large-Scale Ranking

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📊 Statistical Theory

Graph Signal Processing • Scan Statistics • Trend Filtering

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Recent Updates

events

I had the honor of delivering a keynote talk at the NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Large Foundation Models for Educational Assessment. The talk focused on...

events

AI for Education: Bridging Innovation and Responsibility at the 38th AAAI Annual Conference on AI

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I am late to congratulating Xiaoliu Wu (graduated Winter 2022) and right on time to congratulate Ran Sun for completing their PhDs at UC Davis....

research

New results on consistency of nearest neighbor matching

research

What is relaxed label shift?

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Warning: this post is somewhat self-indulgent.

projects

Throughout 2021, my lab worked with Heather Bischel’s lab at UC Davis on realtime Covid outbreak monitoring with wastewater testing. Prof. Bischel’s team, led by...

projects

I have pinned down my data science/machine learning workflow and wanted to share it. It is based on using pip, virtualenv, and pycharm and is...

research

In 2019 we initiated a collaboration between my lab and Tucker Jones’s lab in UC Davis Physics. The idea was to detect gravitational lenses in...

group

I was blessed to see three of my Ph.D. students graduate, especially so because it was during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a heroic effort...

projects

In 2020, The city of Davis and UC Davis initiated Healthy Davis Together a comprehensive response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This project included an executive...

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Congrats to two Ph.D. graduates from my lab: Xiaoyue Li and Dmitry Shemetov!

research

Trend filtering

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Liwei Wu (advised by myself and Cho-Jui Hsieh) recently defended his outstanding thesis in my department. In his research, Liwei has continually pushed the frontier...