Alex Ratner
Co-Founder & CEO, Snorkel AI | Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Washington
Verified Proof of Work Artifacts
2 items catalogedEach artifact below represents an authenticated research publication, production code repository, or technical architectural framework directly authored or co-created by Alex Ratner. Every entry undergoes editorial source verification.
Snorkel: Rapid Training Data Creation with Weak Supervision
Created the Snorkel open-source system and paradigm, using generative probabilistic modeling to combine noisy heuristic rules, knowledge bases, and small models into high-accuracy probabilistic training labels without manual annotation.
Heuristic labeling functions can introduce correlated bias if domain experts write overlapping or conditionally dependent heuristics without proper graph independence modeling.
Data-Centric AI and Programmatic Curation for Foundation Model Post-Training
Authored technical papers establishing the primacy of data curation over model architecture tuning in enterprise LLM adaptation, demonstrating that programmatic alignment yields higher benchmark gains than parameter scaling.
Highly specialized enterprise domains (such as clinical medical ontology or complex derivative trading) require expert human-written labeling functions.