John Dunbar’s portfolio

I’m a 3rd year computer science undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin.

Email: johnjdunbar at utexas dot edu.

What I’m doing right now:

Currently doing research under Scott Aaronson on the theoretical hardness of finding backdoors.

Also running Austin AI Alignment.

Things I did in 2025:

Paper in progress: Mixing behavior in randomly initialized neural nets

Things I did in 2024:

Research Note: Finding backdoors is NP hard

A bunch of random machine learning experiements. e.g.

• How much self-repair is in GPT2 without layernorm? Answer: It’s like the same amount as normal but with higher variance. Kinda interesting since layernorm is the main cause of self-repair in normal models. (code)

• Played around with training SAEs. They can recover the inputs on the toy model of superposition, but the signal is very noisy. (code)
• How well does a random forest on pixels do on MNIST? They can get 97% test accuracy. (code)

Interned as an embedded systems engineer at Lutron. I made the telemetry system on their flagship device go from a hacky sidecar to a normal component.

Things I did in 2023:

Earned a Knuth reward check for finding an error in an one of his equations. MIT Technology Review dramatically calls it “among computerdom’s most prized trophies.”

Was a Software Engineering Intern at Lutron. I wrote software that replaced a $50,000/year DevOps product. It’s now used by our 600 developers. I also found and fixed a privilege escalation vulnerability.

Invented an ISA where hardware interprets a primitive but lisp-like language.

Ran a reading group for the UT Quantum Club

Made robot software to find people and serve drinks to them. We were a team of 3 working in a massive interconnected system of cameras, Linux, ROS, and thousands of libraries.

Wrote a neural network in Numpy with all the fancy stuff.

Things I did in 2022:

Made compiler instead of using my professor’s made-up language.

Was the hardware lead in a high-school robotics team (FTC 8565) and we won the world championship. Here’s a video.