Patrick Taylor

AI engineering• markets

I build tools. I'm a third-year Mathematics and Engineering student at Queen's University, in the Computing and Communication option, from Toronto.

AI is going into everything, and most of my projects come back to one problem: understanding what these systems are actually doing, and building the checks that keep them compliant and accountable. I'm lead author of a paper on testing interpretability methods in vision-language models, accepted at a NeurIPS 2026 workshop. I also work on q-deformed numbers as an NSERC undergraduate researcher. At QUBE, where I'm Director of Capital, I co-built the club's portfolio competition app, which rolls out this term.

Research

NeurIPS 2026 & NSERC USRA
The check passes whether the tool found the AI's idea of damage or a shortcut to answer A
Auditing the AI auditors
NeurIPS InterpScience 2026 • lead author

Researchers use tools that look inside AI models to check why they answer the way they do. We tested one of the most common, along with its standard placebo check. The tool claimed to find how a model sees color. It had really found a shortcut to answer "A", and the check passed it anyway.
At 512 coefficients, 2,061 of 668,745 numbers looked finite and a classifier scored 1.000; at 4,096 coefficients only sqrt(2) and sqrt(3) survived, matching the proved theorem
q-numbers
NSERC USRA • Queen's Mathematics and Statistics

Language models propose and referee proofs on q-deformed real numbers, and a claim only counts once exact computation, Lean 4 and a human read agree. Across 668,745 numbers, a 1.000 classifier score turned out to be a 512-term window artifact; rechecking at 4,096 terms left just √2 and √3, matching the theorem we proved.

Experience

where I have worked
  1. QUBE Capital GroupSept 2024 – present

    Queen's undergraduate business and engineering club. I co-direct the Capital team and co-built the club's portfolio competition app, which rolls out this term.

    1. Director of CapitalApr 2026 – present
    2. IT Sector Portfolio ManagerApr 2025 – Apr 2026
    3. First Year RepresentativeSept 2024 – Apr 2025
  2. NSERC USRA, Queen's MathematicsMay – Aug 2026

    Used machine learning and large-scale computation to look for patterns in pure mathematics, with Profs. Dimitrov, Paquette and Wehlau. More

  3. Private Academic Tutor, Nick's MethodApr – June 2025

    Tutored mathematics and computer science.

The QUBE team at the club's tent on campus
The QUBE team at the club's tent on campus.

Projects

what I have built
Selected
The QUBE Portfolio leaderboard
Portfolio competition app
A mock trading contest for a student investment club. I co-built it for QUBE, and it rolls out this term.
The Whale Agent site and a sample daily digest
Whale Agent
Reads what investors must disclose in three countries, and prices it in one currency.
Out-of-sample equity curves for four portfolio methods
Does a smarter portfolio hold up?
Walk-forward backtest on 10 sector ETFs. Sharpe 0.86 against 0.64, 41% smaller max drawdown.
The four-fifths screen, with two comparisons flagged for review
Which lenders fail the fairness test?
A four-fifths screen over 32.6 million mortgage applications (36.7 million HMDA records). 614 of 5,329 lenders flagged.
The Understudy mark and name over a blurred course schedule from the app
Understudy
A study tutor that answers from your own course files and cites the page.
The Roleweave mark and name over a blurred board of internship applications
Roleweave
A careers tracker whose resume writer only prints what it can prove.

Understudy and Roleweave are built by Carrel Labs.

Tools
Roots of R(q) on the complex plane
qreals
Exact arithmetic on q-deformed numbers
A steady, unchanging waveform
steady
Focus audio generated in the browser
The chance of an on-time TTC arrival
TTC Monte Carlo
The chance of an on-time arrival
Built for other people
QUBE website qubequeens.com↗
Some of my work is club or client work that I cannot open-source. My GitHub has the rest.
Awards and certifications
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Undergraduate Student Research Award August 2026 A competitive national NSERC award. It funds a full-time summer of research under a professor.
Canadian Securities Institute, Canadian Securities Course August 2025 The standard licensing course for securities work in Canada.
Anthropic, Claude Certified Architect, Foundations July 2026 Anthropic's certification for building with Claude.
Earlier work: Exploring the Extremes, exoplanet survey, Harvard Summer School.
pmt
Last updated on Oct 13, 2026