Team

Emergent Methods is comprised of open-source enthusiasts who met while developing and supporting our open-source software FreqAI.
If you are interested in joining our team, checkout our open positions.

Robert Caulk, Ph.D. Founder

Robert is responsible for directing software development, enabling research, coordinating company projects, quality control, proposing external collaborations, and securing funding. He believes firmly in open-source, having spent 12 years accruing over 1000 academic citations building open-source software in domains such as machine learning, image analysis, and coupled physical processes. He received his Ph.D. from Université Grenoble Alpes, France, in computational mechanics. Apart from Flowdapt (large-scale model serving) and FreqAI (adaptive modeling), Robert's open-source software portfolio includes Melissa (large-scale deep learning), DataSieve (data pipelining), Yade (discrete element method), SPAM (image analysis), IterativeStatistics (in-situ statistics), and JaiRevAI (machine learning art generation).

Elin Törnquist, Ph.D. Director of Transparency Research

Elin ensures top-to-bottom transparency in Emergent Methods' research. She combines her experience designing interdisciplinary research projects with her talents at communciating findings. Some examples of her work include the development of experiments for exploring news narrative clustering and tracking, the enforcement and reporting of source diversity in AskNews journalism, as well as the end-user interpretation of our news reporting. She has performed extensive research for both Flowdapt (large-scale model serving) and FreqAI (adaptive modeling). Elin received her Ph.D. from Lund University, Sweden, and is certified by ECMWF in machine learning methods for meteorology and climate.

Tim Pogue Senior Software Developer

Tim is in charge of large-scale systems engineering, which includes leaning on over 10 years of full-stack software development to design and deploy highly-available and performant infrastructure to support the Emergent Methods tech stack. He is also an accomplshed software architect, being one of the primary creators of Flowdapt (large-scale model serving). His experience extends even further with large-scale communications in FreqAI.

Wagner Costa Santos Software Developer / Data Analyst

Wagner is the lead developer for all front-end software at Emergent Methods, such as the AskNews website and the Flowdapt dashboard. He leverages his past experience building B2B projects where he has served in technical and leadership positions. He has solid knowledge in SQL and NoSQL databases, NodeJS, Javascript, React, Python, C#, ElasticSearch, among other technologies. Wagner is also a core developer of Flowdapt and has contributed historic backtesting modules to FreqAI.

Steven Caulk Editor-in-Chief

Steve combines his 20 years as a journalist and editor at the Rocky Mountain News with multiple decades of experience as a public communications specialist to ensure the journalistic integrity of AskNews original content.

Advisors

Chris Evans, Ph.D. Director of Student Media at Rice University, Houston

Chris Evans has more than 20 years of experience in journalism education and student media advising. Chris taught journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C., include multimedia storytelling, audio production, journalism research methods, and news writing. He also served as editorial director of Howard University News Service, a student-powered Howard University News Service, an award-winning online outlet that covers news for and about the African-American community. Chris has recently move back into the world of fully independent student media, taking the position as Director of Student Media at Rice University in Houston.

Jon Accarrino Media Executive, Founder of Ordo Digital

Award-winning media executive Jon Accarrino brings over 25 years of experience driving digital transformation and leveraging technologies to help companies evolve. With a unique blend of expertise in broadcasting, news, and artificial intelligence, Jon has pioneered new platforms and grown revenue for media leaders like NBC News, WRAL, and KSL. His early adoption of AI in media is exemplified by his work at KSL, where he used machine learning tools for branded content production, and at WRAL, where he led an AI project processing 500,000 hours of video assets. As the founder of Ordo Digital, Jon now serves as a vital bridge between news organizations and AI companies, guiding them to innovate and grow together into the future.

Paco Nathan Principal DevRel Engineer, Senzing

Paco Nathan leads developer relations for Senzing's Entity Resolved Knowledge Graph practice. He's a computer scientist with more than 40 years of tech industry experience and core expertise in data science, natural language, graph technologies, and cloud computing. He's also the author of numerous books, videos, and tutorials about these topics. Paco is lead committer for the pytextrank and kglab open source projects. Previously, he was director of O'Reilly Media's Learning Group, and director of community evangelism at Databricks.

Emergent Methods is comprised of open-source enthusiasts who met while developing and supporting our open-source software FreqAI. If you are interested in joining our team, checkout our open positions.