Ben Burtenshaw
Community Education
Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Burtenshaw is a developer-educator and machine learning engineer with nine years of experience building open-source courses and community-focused tooling for Hugging Face. Based in Antwerp and holding a PhD, he blends hands-on backend and full-stack engineering—implementing SFT, evaluation and alignment modules for smol models and practical tooling for agent courses—with a knack for translating research into teachable, reproducible examples. At Hugging Face he drives community education and ML advocacy, helping developers adopt and fine-tune open models through courses like the Agents and Smol curricula. His background spans academia, industry, and instructional roles (including lecturing and running Python bootcamps), which informs a pragmatic approach to developer learning and curriculum design. Notably, his contributions emphasize practical tool usage and evaluation workflows that bridge notebooks and production-ready examples.
9 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at University of AntwerpBachelor's degree, Bachelor's degree at Goldsmiths, University of LondonMasters of Research - Mres Cultural Research, Masters of Research - Mres Cultural Research at University of BrightonMaster's degree, Master's degree at ArtEZ University of the Arts
Dutch, French, English
Github Skills (12)
transformers10
lora10
python-course10
machine-learning10
parameter-tuning10
jupyter-notebook10
agent10
language-model10
python10
fine-tuning10
huggingface9
huggingface-hub9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
huggingface/smol-course
Nov 2024 - Feb 2026
A course on aligning smol models.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:84 reviews, 132 PRs, 214 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Ben implemented the supervised fine-tuning module within the repository, demonstrating a focus on adapting the pre-trained language model SmolLM2-135M to new tasks, as shown in `sft_finetuning_example.ipynb`. They integrated chat templates with both SmolLM2 and Llama models, as seen in `chat_templates_example.ipynb`, for consistent and contextually appropriate responses. The user also introduced an evaluation module, as shown in `comparing_task_formulations.ipynb`, highlighting expertise in model assessment and comparing different prompt formulations. The preference alignment module, demonstrated through the DPO finetuning and ORPO examples, shows expertise in aligning the model.
huggingface/agents-course
Jan 2025 - Jul 2025
This repository contains the Hugging Face Agents Course.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:102 reviews, 104 PRs, 132 pushes in 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on adding functionality related to tool usage within the Hugging Face Agents course. The initial commit introduced example code using `dummy_agent_library.ipynb`, including the use of functions related to checking the agenda and retrieving agenda items. Subsequent commits involved merging code from different branches, including updating quiz questions and merging changes into a unit notebook. Overall, the contributions demonstrate a focus on expanding the course's practical examples.
huggingfaceagentic-aiagentslangchainllamaindex
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