Connor Shorten
Research Assistant at Florida Atlantic University
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolConnor Shorten is a research-focused software engineer and PhD candidate in Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University with eight years of hands-on experience building backend systems for AI and database projects. Based in Boston, he contributes to high-profile open-source efforts like Weaviate, adding modules and integrating multiple generative models while improving tests and refactoring core backend components. His work on retrieval integrations—such as implementing the WeaviateRM in Stanford NLP’s DSPy—demonstrates a practical blend of vector search, hybrid retrieval, and systems engineering. As a graduate student specializing in deep learning, he pairs academic research with production-minded engineering, routinely bridging model pipelines and cloud-native vector databases. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic developer who surfaces non-obvious improvements in module integration and retrieval robustness.
8 years of coding experience
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University
Stackoverflow
19reputation
158reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (14)
weaviate10
vector-search10
vector-database10
application-integration10
go10
api10
integrate10
dnspy10
python10
apidoc10
integrations10
json9
develop8
grpc8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
stanfordnlp/dspy
Aug 2023 - Feb 2025
DSPy: The framework for programming—not prompting—language models
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 36 PRs, 33 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Connor primarily contributed to the `dspy` repository by implementing and refining the `WeaviateRM` retrieval module. Their work involved setting up the integration with the Weaviate vector database, including initial implementation, correcting errors, and improving functionality. The user addressed issues related to text key customization, and added hybrid search capabilities within the `WeaviateRM` module. They also worked on correcting typos and updating dependencies within the project.
nlpbertknowledgepredictlanguage-models
weaviate/weaviate
Sep 2021 - Oct 2024
Weaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 17 PRs, 129 pushes in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Connor primarily contributed to the backend of the Weaviate project, focusing on the implementation and configuration of modules. The commits involved integrating the generative-cohere module, including the setup of API keys and the parsing of responses. Furthermore, the user added support for the reranker-cohere module and the Ollama module, demonstrating experience with different generative models. The commits also showcase experience with code refactoring and test creation.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchsemantic-search-enginehnswfaultsimilarity-search
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