Cassidy Laidlaw
Graduate Student Researcher
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolCassidy Laidlaw is a PhD student in computer science at UC Berkeley and an experienced engineer with 11 years building production software, research systems, and ML tools across academia, government, and startups. They blend hands-on consulting and product development—ranging from rebuilding a payments-enabled mentoring platform to deploying security-focused analytics for DHS—with rigorous research into adversarial machine learning. As an open-source contributor to the CleverHans project, Cassidy implemented and hardened the SPSA adversarial attack in PyTorch, adding L2 support, clamping, and sanity checks that improve benchmarking reliability. Comfortable translating between research and production, they have led end-to-end projects in web, mobile, and data science while presenting technical work to stakeholders including federal agencies. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cassidy brings a rare mix of applied ML, systems engineering, and academic depth that helps organizations move cutting-edge models into reliable, real-world use.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science, Minor in Middle East Studies, 4.0 GPA, Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics and Computer Science, Minor in Middle East Studies, 4.0 GPA at University of Maryland
English
Stackoverflow
1,338reputation
252kreached
21answers
10questions
Github Skills (18)
pytorch10
benchmark10
adversarial-attacks10
python10
machine-learning10
benchmarking10
security10
algorithms9
numpy8
html6
type-checking6
django-models6
android6
psutil6
css6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
cleverhans-lab/cleverhans
Jul 2019 - Jan 2020
An adversarial example library for constructing attacks, building defenses, and benchmarking both
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 8 comments in 6 months
Contributions summary:Cassidy implemented and refined the SPSA (Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation) attack within the PyTorch framework, a core component of the CleverHans library. They focused on adding features like L2 norm support and clamping, improving the attack's robustness and adherence to defined constraints. The user also addressed potential issues by including additional sanity checks, ensuring code reliability. Overall, the contributions centered around expanding and improving the adversarial attack capabilities of the library.
benchmarkingrobustnessadversarial-machine-learningsecurityadversarial
cassidylaidlaw/ray
Mar 2021 - Mar 2023
An open source framework that provides a simple, universal API for building distributed applications. Ray is packaged with RLlib, a scalable reinforcement learning library, and Tune, a scalable hyperparameter tuning library.
Contributions:29 pushes, 5 branches in 2 years 1 month
apirayscalabledistributed-applicationshyperparameter
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