Welcome To ML Bridge

Hello. I'm Tom McKennon. Welcome to my site.

I am retired from mainstream employment. My background is in enterprise data, neural networks, economics, and investments. I worked at the Defense Department, Bloomberg Financial Markets, the CBT and CBOE exchanges, IBM, and Prudential investments.

I am interested in labor economics, specifically post-secondary education, and the job market. The datasets I work with include the Current Population Survey, the American Community Survey, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey (BLS), the Census Economic Survey, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Dept. of Labor O*Net, and U.S. News College Compass. My first publication on a data topic is here.

I just started work on a labor economics dashboard using a combination of these datasets. The storyline is inspired by a publication that is no longer in print called The State of Working America, which was last published in 2012.

I am also interested in neural networks and natural language processing as a means to add a qualitative aspect to my research. My experience at IBM gives me a jump start, but the recent introduction of pre-trained models and generative transformers have significantly changed the techniques used for NLP. I am experimenting with Amazon Comprehend, pre-trained BERT models, and social media feeds to see if I can derive qualitative information about people’s attitudes about work, their financial condition, and their prospects for the future.

A motivation for these activities is that the headline media presents a distorted picture of U.S. labor market and general economic conditions for a majority of households. It is a generally acknowledged fact that real earnings for most workers have been flat for 20 years while the cost of education, health care, and housing has soared. At the same time corporate profits, and elite earnings have increased significantly. After making significant household investments in college, many new graduates experience long periods of unemployment. This is even true for technical degrees in computer science and engineering. To make things worse, recent advances in AI and robotics in the short term and quantum computing in the longer term, introduce additional economic pressures and uncertainty for both the existing labor force and new entrants. While the returns to education are real, the direct and indirect costs for the education required to participate in a tech-driven, corporate work force introduces significant investment risk for most households, who face increased costs for the essentials: housing, health insurance, energy, and quality food.

The site is a work in progress. I will post research results and technical milestones in Premium Content. I post articles on specific techniques in Free Articles.

I hope folks find the material useful.

Feel free to contact me at talk@mlbridgeresearch.com or on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/thomasmckennon59983316a.