Mark Torres

I build machine learning systems that study social behavior online at scale. My work spans ML infrastructure, LLM-powered products, and behavior-driven insights. At Northwestern, I lead engineering and ML for academic research on social platforms. As a consultant, I help teams apply AI—whether it’s building recommendation engines, automating workflows, or extracting insight from messy behavioral data. Whatever moves the needle, I ship it.

Hi!Permalink

I’m Mark — an AI generalist and ML engineer with one foot in research and the other in production. At Northwestern, I lead AI and ML engineering for academic work on online behavior and influence. In my consulting practice, I help teams apply machine learning and LLMs to real-world problems—building tools, agents, and infrastructure that automate, augment, or accelerate their work. I bridge research and engineering to help teams ship smart, scalable systems. My focus is simple: solve real problems with real systems that ship.

Current: Lead AI Engineer @Northwestern (2023-present)Permalink

Building applied AI systems for social media research and computational social science.

  • Leading development of an AI agent simulation platform to study information flow, opinion dynamics, and influence on digital platforms — a modular, “custom AI-powered Facebook simulator” for academic use.
  • Creating open-source tools that provide scalable, reproducible access to millions of social media records for research teams studying behavior, ideology, and discourse online.
  • Designing and prototyping large-scale, AI-driven feed ranking algorithms for experimental studies in political and social influence.
  • Bridging ML engineering with academic research by owning data pipelines, modeling infrastructure, and real-time recommendation engines used across lab projects.

Previous: Data Scientist @SetSail (Series A Silicon Valley startup) (2021-2023)Permalink

  • Lots of typing (data scientist startup bro edition)

Previous: Data Scientist @Yale (2020-2021)Permalink

  • Developed a proprietary predictive algorithm for tracking the spread and incidence of COVID using network graph data (see Hunala).
  • Lots of typing (yung fledging data scientist edit)

Published a few papers here and therePermalink

My Google Scholar Profile.

  • Brady, W.J., McLoughlin, K.L., Torres, M.P. et al. Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility. Nat Hum Behav 7, 917–927 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01582-0
  • Iwamoto, S.K., Alexander, M., Torres, M. et al. Mindfulness Meditation Activates Altruism. Sci Rep 10, 6511 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62652-1

Education:Permalink

  • MS, Computer Science, @UT Austin
  • BS, Statistics, @Yale
  • Certificate, Mrs. Puff’s Boating School

Et ceteraPermalink

I am a retired digital nomad, now based out of Chicago.