Ryan Wesslen
Data scientist and researcher. GenAI, NLP, evaluation, and the occasional regulatory rabbit hole.
I'm a data scientist focused on GenAI and NLP — particularly evaluation, agentic systems, and what it actually takes to make these things reliable in practice. My academic research sits at the intersection of HCI and ML/NLP, looking at how humans make decisions alongside or in response to model outputs.
Before that: roughly a decade in banking, starting in credit risk during the financial crisis — an instructive time to learn what happens when models meet tail events. Since 2019, I've done NLP, AI, and now GenAI work in banking, with a detour to Explosion, the team behind spaCy. It's where I started noticing a pattern that keeps repeating: transformative technology arrives fast, organizational incentive structures form around it even faster, and the gap between the two is where most of the interesting — and expensive — problems live.
I also teach occasionally as an adjunct, with courses ranging from Applications of LLMs to visual analytics to Bayesian statistics .
This blog is where I think out loud about things I haven't figured out yet. Most posts end with an open question. Views are strictly my own.