The Lunar Engineer
CEO and Chief Data Shepherd of Lunar Engineering
I am Timothy David Luna.
I’ve learned and forgotten more than one spoken language, love math, and am currently splitting my time between family, work, and my pet projects. I am an inventor; I pick up whatever tools I need to do whatever I need to do, when I need to do it, and I love to create.
I work in a cloud based environment and am comfortable adapting to novel environments with little effort.
I have first-hand experience building the technical stack required for automated learning including usage of IaC products such as Terraform and containerization utilities and frameworks including Docker and Kubernetes.
I’ve built my own computers, I run my own homelab, and I’m pretty comfortable working in a linux CLI environment. Over the years I’ve worked with programming languages ranging from base C / Basic to C++ / Java, Python, front-end web stack, and a few more things. I’m ‘conversationally fluent’ with the required tool stack to extract meaning from raw information beginning with fundamentals of computer science, a strong understanding of computer infrastructure, a robust backlog of experience in various software languages and environment, and daily work with the tools required to interact with, shape, and leverage structured and unstructured information to solve problems.
I am comfortable moving from ideation to implementation and am comfortable designing, implementing, and validating the algorithms I develop.
I am a mentor and leader both at, and outside, of work.
My interests (obsession) revolve around integrating human and machine learners into unifying frameworks in order to optimize the future with explicit guarantees.
Work Experience
State Farm: Senior Data Scientist (Late 2019 to Now)
I lead and guide complex and intertwined work efforts across a portfolio of projects which include supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models, in support of various business processes in a highly dynamic environment. I also design and implement custom algorithms and solutions to test hypotheses and solve business problems.
As a technical innovator and problem solver I’ve implemented a software stack and CI/CD pipeline in support of the design and implementation of an ML Ops pipeline and specialized data structure in order to automate current and future business problem solutions.
As a technical leader and mentor I emphasize and have implemented a framework and mindset of test-driven development in support of both typical software solutions and algorithmic development activities.
As a technical expert I’ve engineered custom solutions to solve problems and improve existing processes; my technical development for a particular family of deterministic models reduced the model data complexity at runtime from exponential to logarithmic in input, dropping runtime and integrating with automation.
Working at State Farm I’ve gained valuable experience and knowledge into how to tie together different components of a business to solve problems effectively. This has given me greater understanding into how the modeling and business components of a large organization could be viewed as an feedback driven automated system to cost-effectively optimize business decisions within a unified framework.
Army Futures Command: The Research and Analysis Center (Late 2016 to Late 2019)
During my time working for TRAC I engineered a quality control program using R in the data processes for their primary combat model; with a combination of statistical testing concepts, visualization, and standardized reporting I instituted an assured pedigree for modeling outcomes. I also developed simulations in Python to allow for studies examining analyses of alternatives for different major procurement programs.
While I worked at TRAC I learned quite a bit about Data Science and a lot about how truly large organizations are run effectively.
Professional Student (April 2012 - May 2016)
I used my GI Bill, along with vocational rehabilition funding provided to me as a disabled Veteran, to go back to school for Aerospace Engineering. While I was here I fell in love with math, numerical computation, and control theory; my learning here allowed me to view my analytic experience in the Army in a much broader context.
The concepts behind automatic optimization were introduced to me here in the form of Optimal Control.
United States Army and Government Contracting (April 2003 - April 2012)
For almost a decade of my life I spent my time learning how to lead and manage limited resources to accomplish challenging missions. I also authored intelligence reports and analyzed large communications networks as part of my work as a Signals Intelligence Analyst. The last few years I spent formally instructing junior service members in technical skills and during that time I gained valuable experience tailoring instructional material to diverse learning styles.
Personal Projects
I’ve started blogging and am currently working on a series of posts about ‘one-click’ deployment of a Data Science environment using Terraform, Kubernetes, and Helm charts to deploy a notebook modeling environment with Role Based Access Control and block storage.
This environment is being spun up to support my planned experimentation exploring optimizing learning for many potentially independent learners with potentially differing goals by guided manipulation of embedding spaces.
Education
- Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology - 2021
- Bachelor’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering, University of Kansas - 2016
- Associates Degree in Foreign Studies (Kurdish), Defense Language Institute, Foreign Language Center - 2003
Research Interests
- Meta-learning
- Cognition
- Artificial Memory
- ProcessOps (People make these words up all the time, why can’t I?)