I recently completed my Ph.D. in Political Science at McGill University. In Fall 2025, I’ll be starting a post-doctoral fellowship at the Université de Montréal. I specialize in developing ways to use language models to understand political language, especially in international diplomacy. I also study global AI governance, and I am particularly interested in the intersection of technical and normative standards. Additionally, I have done some advisory work on AI and pedagogy at McGill, and have taught some methodological workshops on how to use language models as a research tool.
- Domesticating Wealth Inequality. Vincent Pouliot and Scott Robert Patterson. Global Studies Quarterly, 2024.
- Placing Machine Learning into the Hermeneutic Circle. Scott Robert Patterson and Vincent Pouliot. Journal of International Relations and Development, 2024.
- State Detection NER Demo - This is a custom named entity detection (NER) model that can extract mentions of countries from unstructured text. Follow the link to test out the most recent version.
- Occupation Classifier - A fine-tuned GPT model for classifying occupations using BLS codes. Follow the link to try the most recent version.
- Audio transcription - This illustrates how to transcribe audio files for free using the OpenAI whisper model. If working with many files or with large files, this colab version works better and allows for free-tier GPU acceleration.
- Mistral OCR This is a simple interface to use the Mistral OCR tool. For more about Mistral OCR, see this link
- Dynamic Prompt Developer. Under development
At McGill, I contributed to some of the early policy work on the pedagogical impacts of Generative AI.
- AI Working Group, Teaching and Learning Services - I co-authored this policy recommendation as the graduate student representative to this working group. I was mostly interested in clarifying the technical differences between detecting plagiarism and AI-generated content for academic integrity issues.
- Briefing to the Faculty of Arts - This is a memo that I wrote to brief the Faculty of Arts on capabilities and future trajectories of generative AI. It discusses capabilities, key actors, and potential pedagogical impacts (from the vantage of March 2023).
Contact: scott[dot]patterson[at]mail[dot]mcgill[dot]ca