Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Programmer and writer based in 📍 Montreal, Quebec

💼 Work Experience

Handle data from scientific papers used to train an AI research assistant, Elicit.
Manage the tasks necessary to acquire the data from human contractors.
Run calls to language models and evaluate the results.

Freelance writing and editing, see for instance this piece on scientific style for Works in Progress
iOS/Swift freelance work for Michael Olsen & Partnere A/S. Debugged and added features to an iOS app used to manage car dealership audits.
The Journal of Accessible and Well-Written Science: JAWWS was a project to improve the quality of science writing that is aimed at other scientists. I have been researching ways to make a paper less cognitively demanding, as well as examining how the current norms in scientific publishing came about. As of now the project is on hiatus, but visit the website I created or the newsletter to read my writing on these topics. Has been funded by New Science.
Interintellect: Interintellect organizes intellectual discussion salons. I worked for five months to help set up the company’s website (on Wordpress) and other behind-the-scene tasks. I have also organized more than ten salons, online and in person, since December 2020.
Blog — Atlas of Wonders and Monsters: I write a weekly blog post on various topics, now for more than 100 consecutive weeks. Feel free to subscribe.
The Classical Futurist: A monthly magazine to think about the future from the lens of classical antiquity that I co-founded with two friends.
Fiction: I finished and edited a novel about New France and Quebec historical cinema. It’s currently in the hands of potential publishers. I also occasionally write short stories.

Worked on a macOS app used internally by linguists to manage and update lexicographic data.
Created new interface elements, measurements to evaluate data quality, and other features.
Developed ways to deal with natural language data and present it to users (homophones, synonyms, rhymes, etc.) in the company’s main software product.
Main technologies used: Swift, Objective-C, C++, Python, MySQL, Xcode, Gitlab.

Used machine learning and NLP to mine data from medical literature on vascular surgery and train a logistic regression model to predict surgical outcomes based on patient frailty.
Showed that text mining can be useful to preselect the features of a machine learning model when there is only a small amount of available patient data.
Main technologies used: Python, Jupyter Notebooks, machine learning libraries.
Supervised by Joelle Pineau and Audrey Durand

Managed and analyzed data from cancer patients with a goal of helping physicians improve the outcomes of cancer care in the McGill University hospital network.

Helped with the online inventory of a classical music CD vendor (2013)
Was a camp counsellor for teenagers in French immersion for the summer in Quebec City (2012)
Worked with hazardous materials data at two Canadian military bases (2010-2011)
Showed visitors around and handled the telescope at a small astronomical observatory (2009)

A European master’s program intended to gain research experience at various universities. I spent two non-consecutive semesters at Uppsala, Sweden; one at Montpellier, France; and one at Harvard, Massachusetts.
In France, I worked on theoretical modelling of biological innovation.
In Sweden, I worked on paleontological data from Siberia.
At Harvard, I worked under prof. Joe Henrich on phylogenetic trees in the context of cultural evolution in human societies.

Minor in computer science
Undergraduate thesis on toads and sexual dimorphism
Highlight: a field course to learn about dinosaur paleontology in Saskatchewan
Spent the summer of 2013 on a research internship to model food chains; I coded a simulation in Java

Apple frameworks (Swift, Objective-C, UIKit; I’ve done both macOS and iOS programming)
Python
Wordpress setup and customization
Jekyll static websites
Git, GitHub, GitLab
Databases, SQL
I know the basics of blockchains and crypto

I have written four complete novels, none of which have been published (but I’m hoping the latest one will be)
I have published three short stories in various literary magazines, one of which was adapted into a short film

Typesetting: LaTeX
Programming languages: Java, C, C++
Data science: R, some Python libraries, machine learning (which I’m currently reviewing)