Projects & Patents
Companies and open-source software Scott has built or led, plus granted US patents as named inventor.
Projects
- Distributional
A modern platform for enterprise AI testing and production behavioral analytics. Distributional turns raw LLM and agent trace data into actionable insights, helping organizations make AI safe, reliable, and secure through automated testing, statistical analysis of data distributions, and continuous adaptive testing throughout the AI lifecycle. Founded July 2023; $30M raised from Andreessen Horowitz, Two Sigma Ventures, and others; serving multiple Fortune 500 customers.
- SigOpt
An intelligent experimentation platform that accelerated and amplified the impact of modelers everywhere using Bayesian optimization to efficiently tune models and run experiments. Y Combinator W15. Raised approximately $17M from Andreessen Horowitz, Blumberg Capital with Two Sigma, In-Q-Tel, and others. Acquired by Intel in November 2020.
- ALE (Assembly Likelihood Evaluation)
A generic assembly likelihood evaluation framework for assessing the accuracy of genome and metagenome assemblies. ALE provides a reference-free quality metric using a probabilistic model of read placement. Originated during a DOE Joint Genome Institute practicum and published in Bioinformatics with 200+ citations.
- MOE (Metric Optimization Engine)
A global, black-box Bayesian optimization engine for real-world metric optimization. Built at Yelp, MOE implements state-of-the-art algorithms from Bayesian Global Optimization using Gaussian Processes and provides REST, Python, and C++ interfaces.
- Yelp Dataset Challenge
Yelp's flagship academic data competition, providing real-world business, review, and user data to students and researchers worldwide. Scott created, implemented, and directed the program at Yelp; it ran for multiple rounds beginning in 2013, expanded internationally in 2014, and has been used by over 100,000 students.
- sc932/resume — LaTeX Resume Template
An open-source LaTeX template for academic and industry resumes, with 500+ GitHub stars. The same repository also hosts Scott's longer academic CV and a structured markdown profile, all generated from a single source.
Patents
- Accelerated Tuning / Advanced Curtailment 5 patents
Systems and methods for accelerating hyperparameter tuning through early curtailment of unpromising trials in a machine learning optimization service.
- US 11,157,812 (2021)
- US 11,704,567 (2023)
- US 12,159,209 (2024)
- US 12,373,699 (2025)
- US 12,450,479 (2025)
Michael McCourt, Jackle-Spriggs, Ben-Cheng Hsu, Howey, Vance, Jim Blomo, Patrick Hayes, Scott C. Clark
- Anomaly Detection in Deployed Artificial Intelligence Applications 1 patent
Methods and systems for detecting anomalous behavior in production AI applications using statistical analysis of behavioral signals from inference traces.
Michael McCourt, Rachel Bourassa-Denis, Kyle Laban, Olivia Kim, Ian Dewancker, Bolong Cheng, Scott C. Clark
- Intelligent Optimization Platform 11 patents
Systems and methods for an intelligent experimentation and optimization platform that efficiently tunes parameters of expensive black-box models.
- US 10,217,061 (2019)
- US 10,282,237 (2019)
- US 10,379,913 (2019)
- US 10,445,150 (2019)
- US 10,565,025 (2020)
- US 10,607,159 (2020)
- US 11,163,615 (2021)
- US 11,301,781 (2022)
- US 11,709,719 (2023)
- US 12,141,667 (2024)
- US 12,236,287 (2025)
Patrick Hayes, Michael McCourt, Alexandra Johnson, George Ke, Scott C. Clark
- Multi-Solution Hyperparameter Tuning 2 patents
Systems and methods for generating multiple solution sets during hyperparameter tuning to support diverse model selection criteria.
Kelvin Tee, Michael McCourt, Patrick Hayes, Scott C. Clark
- Multiple Tuning Criteria Optimization 6 patents
Systems and methods for hyperparameter optimization across multiple competing objectives or constraints simultaneously.
- US 10,528,891 (2020)
- US 10,558,934 (2020)
- US 10,621,514 (2020)
- US 10,740,695 (2020)
- US 11,699,098 (2023)
- US 12,033,036 (2024)
Bolong Cheng, Olivia Kim, Michael McCourt, Patrick Hayes, Scott C. Clark, Jackle-Spriggs, Vance, Ben-Cheng Hsu, Frey