Duel for Middle-earth
I'm building a fan-made two-player web adaptation with live and asynchronous play from the same persisted game.
I build AI products, and I use the same tools to help my family learn.
I'm Matt Trefilek, a software and machine-learning engineer in Madison, Wisconsin. Tref Software is where I keep my software, research, family projects, and the notes I write about them.
What I work on
Building products
Software, machine-learning systems, and research from work and my own projects.
Learning at home
When my family gets interested in a subject, we use the same tools to research it and make a game or project together.
I like learning by making something. That applies to software at work and to a learning game at the kitchen table.
01 · Current and recent
Featured work
Liberty Letters: March to Victory
This Revolutionary War–themed letter-recognition game has a browser activity and a printable PDF.
Private learning with foundation models
My 2021 paper tested foundation-model features as a baseline for differentially private learning at low ε.
02 · At home
Liberty Letters
One of our kids was working on letter recognition, so I made a browser game with a Revolutionary War storybook theme. A child hears a letter, chooses it from three tiles, and advances the scene after a correct answer.
I also made a printable PDF letter activity for practicing away from the screen.
03 · From the blog
Latest from the blog
04 · About
About me
I've worked as a full-stack developer, finished a master's in computer science at UW–Madison focused on machine learning, worked on NLP and infrastructure problems at Rentable, and now work as an AI engineer at MoveIn. My about page has the rest of my background and older projects. You can email matthew.trefilek@trefsoftware.com and I'll answer.