About Me

Since , I am primarily a part-time community manager and engineer assisting and promoting the AIFoundry.org community, supported under contract by AiNEKKO. Together, we aim to build a fully open platform for ML/AI and similar parallel compute applications with a manycore processor architecture, from the RTL HDL on up through the software that runs on it. The community is open to the public and welcomes external all contribution that supports our shared mission and goals.
Academics
I attended Downingtown High School West Campus from through , at which time I graduated sixth in my class (of 384) with a weighted GPA of 4.4. During that time, I received a Bausch + Lomb Honorary Science Award for scientific achievement as a junior and was listed on the distinguished honor roll for all four years I attended.
After high school, I selected to enter undergraduate study at the Pennsylvania State University in pursuit of a Bachelor of Science in (General) Engineering as part of their (very small) Multidisciplinary Engineering Design program, which is offered through Brandywine with additional support from Great Valley. I was a student of the program until voluntarily leaving the university due to various personal circumstances in . After a two-semester gap, I returned in to complete my degree, and after a year-long senior capstone developing and integrating the basis of a high-temperature additive manufacturing machine for metals and ceramics, graduated in . I have retained a good relationship with the program since and continue to volunteer part-time in support of its students.
Experience
Competition Robotics
I participated in the VEX Robotics Competition as a member of the world-renowned VEXMEN of Brandywine Robotics throughout my secondary schooling, first as a part of Team 80P VEXMEN: Pyro for the 2012–2013 season (Sack Attack), and after the team was split in two, as a part of Team 80Y VEXMEN: Cypher for the 2013–2014 (Toss Up) and 2014–2015 (Skyrise) seasons. VEXMEN: Cypher transitioned into high school with a number change to 81Y for the 2015–2016 season (Nothing But Net), and would continue participating that way for the 2016–2017 (Starstruck), 2017–2018 (In The Zone), and 2018–2019 (Turning Point) seasons, after which the core of the team fully aged out of competition.
Teams 80Y and 81Y VEXMEN: Cypher were highly successful. 80Y attended the 2015 VEX Robotics World Championship, and through a combination of luck, skill, and smooth-talking, managed to find itself a Middle School Tournament Finalist (and while at it, nearly winning the prestigious Excellence Award). After a gap of a year, 81Y qualified and returned to the VEX Robotics World Championship in 2017 by winning the High School Excellence Award at the Pennsylvania State Championship, from which it earned the Math Division Engineering Award. 81Y attended the VEX Robotics World Championship for the last time in 2018 by qualifying as a Tournament Finalist of the Pennsylvania State Championship, and represented the team's most successful run: As the only team in the tournament to win every autonomous period it participated in, through sheer consistency it defeated the top-ranked seed in Research Division to become a Division Champion and High School Tournament Finalist.
My primary role with VEXMEN: Cypher throughout its lifetime was, perhaps fittingly, being the team's dedicated programmer. The experience accumulated established a strong background in embedded programming, system design & integration, and controls.
Lockheed Martin Learning for Life Aviation
Hosted by volunteers of both former and then-current employees of the Sikorsky Coatesville plant, this program involved a variety of educational activities related to the field of aviation. The program's primary focus, however, was restoring a RotorWay Scorpion Too owned by the American Helicopter Museum of West Chester, Pennsylvania, to displayable condition. After (many, many) hours of labor, the (now blue) Scorpion Too restored by the program is now on display, paired alongside a Model 133.
EleutherAI
I stumbled into joining EleutherAI as a contributor in , and would later become a core member by . During my time volunteering, I would become maintainer and webmaster of the EleutherAI website and blog, redevelop its logo, and (most significantly) assist in the creation of GPT-NeoX-20B. After two years of dedicated contributorship and direct involvement in three published papers, various personal and interpersonal circumstances made my volunteering unsustainable and forced me to depart against my desire in .
Intel Innovators Program
As a long-time Intel graphics user perpetually jaded by NVIDIA's antics and intrigued by the emergence of a new competitor in the discrete graphics and accelerator market, I applied for and was granted access to the Intel Innovators program on the oneAPI track for my work on GPT-NeoX-20B in . This led to amateur involvement in Intel developer relations (notably as a moderator of the Intel DevHub Discord server), for which in return I received hardware (such as an Arc A770 Limited Edition and a Lunar Lake Development Kit) to experiment with. With Intel's layoffs and restructuring in turning their marketing efforts to an external consultancy, the oneAPI track came to an end and I no longer have a close or meaningful working relationship with the company.
Panverse Robotics
What came to be known as Panverse Robotics was a venture formed by me and a few other EleutherAI regulars in as an attempt to secure a Batch 2 Commercial AI Grant seed investment through a plan for advanced usage of neural fields for robotics. Despite making it far with our initial pitch, we were ultimately not selected and pivoted to a bootstrapping business plan built around the then-emerging 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) concept, an initial phase of which was a consumer-focused 3DGS service marketed as Portality. Ultimately, the small team was unable to reach market fast enough before larger players with more resources entered, and with the product still not fully launched before , the company reached the end of its run and was dissolved by the end of that calendar year.
About this website
This website is one I have constructed myself to be my personal public portfolio and blog. There is no particular focus, other than it is all content I would like to make accessible beyond myself and share with others—expect articles of varying types covering a range of topics and experiences, most often of primarily technical or academic nature written to an audience I feel will best benefit from the communication of the content.
This website is statically generated with Hugo and strives to be as accessible to navigate and consume as possible across screen sizes and device types. It is perpetually in development, and organization is not concrete—articles are living documents and I may change content as I see fit. Suggestions for improvement are welcome; readers should feel free to drop me a line if there is a change they believe can improve the user experience.
Contacting and Inquiries
Those looking to contact me, the author, maintainer, and webmaster of this website, can do so through a multitude of platforms:
- Signal
- Available upon request for high-priority E2EE messaging
- Discord
- erichallahan#0: Available via my personal server, direct message requests open
- @EricHallahan: Legacy Twitter Direct Message requests open
- Eric Hallahan: Messaging available
- Bluesky
- @erichallahan.bsky.social: Messaging available if I follow, not preferred
- Email & Telephone
- Personal email and telephone available upon request
Respectful inquiries of all kinds are welcome.