Alex Alvarez
Undergrad @ Texas A&M University
Researcher @ Brain Networks Lab + Rockwell Automation Lab
calvarez1 [at] tamu [dot] edu
About Me
I'm a senior computer science + neuroscience student at Texas A&M University. In the past I built and sold some companies but at the moment I'm focusing on AI research. I'm a stoic, a voracious reader, and a lover of all combat sports.
Research
Artificial Curiosity
Intrinsically motivated goal exploration algorithms for autotelic agents. We are creating AI agents, giving them an environment, and letting them create their own goals. The agent learns about the environment through it's own curiosity. Then we analyze it's internal structures to find out how "conscious" it is (consciousness/understanding is very hard to quantify, we are looking for meaningful representations).
Fine Tuning LLMs to Emulate Instructor
TIC-TOC: Enhancing Industrial Control Education through an Intelligent Tutoring System for Real-Time Interaction and Engagement. Researching the best intelligent tutoring systems and combining them with fine-tuned multi-modal LLMs to create a novel learning experience that emulates individual professor's feedbacks for the engineering students at TAMU. We already have permission to implement the ITS in a TAMU materials class for the Spring 2025 semester.
Projects
Swati AI
A chrome extension that allows you to get an AI-based simplified explanation of whatever you highlight in-browser and in-context… for free.
Robots Can Do Your Taxes
There does not exist commercially-available software that can extricate personal expenses from business expenses within the same statement. If you used your business credit card for personal use (and vice versa) you have to manually sift through each transaction to separate them. I created a RL model that fixed this and plan to make it commercially available upon graduation.
Zyntora
I was part of a startup called Zyntora, an attempt at a virtual real-estate and social media app that was ahead of its time.