Dr. Roderick – AI Engineer with a PhD in Computer Science  

AI Engineer Dr. Roderick is an HCI and AI researcher with expertise in conversational systems, large language models, and multimodal data visualization. He specializes in designing intelligent, agentic workflows that support complex decision-making and data-driven collaboration.

Services:

• AI Engineer
• Technical Writing/Editing
• Poster and Slide Deck Preparation
• User Study Design
• UI/UX Design Review and Consulting
• Design & Development of custom AI/NLP interfaces
• Prompt Engineer for LLM-Based Applications
• Development of Agentic Workflows
• Full-stack Web Development
• AI Deployment and Development
• API Integration and Vector Databases
• Data Visualization Consulting
• Custom Visualization Components
• Basic and Applied Research in Human-AI Interaction and Conversational UX

Dr. Roderick earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and his dissertation explored how AI systems can intervene more naturally during open-ended analytical tasks compared to traditional back-and-forth dialogue. His research draws from theories in pragmatics and natural language processing to build assistants that anticipate user needs, generate timely data visualizations, and improve collaborative performance.

Building on his earlier M.S. thesis, Dr. Roderick developed and deployed a full-stack, always-listening AI assistant that interprets natural language commands and proactively creates charts. His work leverages GPT- and LLaMA-based foundation models for entity extraction, chart reasoning, and interaction timing—demonstrating significant improvements in user engagement and discovery. In a controlled study comparing proactive vs. non-proactive assistants, this assistant generated 3x more insights and significantly higher verbal engagement, while also revealing the tension between helpfulness and intrusiveness in human–AI interaction.

Dr. Roderick is particularly interested in agentic workflows and agentic conversational systems—systems that not only respond but take initiative, reason over complex tasks, and collaborate with users in extended, goal-driven interactions. His research investigates how these systems can balance autonomy with user expectations, especially in collaborative and data-rich environments.

Beyond his thesis research, Dr. Roderick’s applied work as an AI Engineer has been recognized with multiple national awards, including the NASA AGU Data Visualization Grand Prize (2023) for no-code visualization dashboards and won $10,000 in funding support for the National Security Innovation Network Hackathon (2022) for Virtual Reality satellite communication visualization. He has published and presented multiple first-author papers at international ACM conferences (IUI, CUI), with additional contributions to NSF-funded platforms such as SAGE3, a collaborative infinite canvas for real-time scientific visualization.

Areas of Expertise:

• Proactive Conversational Interfaces & Always-Listening AI
• NLP, LLMs, Prompt Engineering
• Data Visualization and Real-Time Interfaces
• Full-Stack Web Development (React, FastAPI, Electron, AWS, Javascript/Typescript, Python)
• Empirical Research Design (Mixed Methods, HCI Studies)

To work with ScienceDocs AI Engineer Dr. Roderick, please visit our quote page and request him in the description area.