Jesse Roberts
Assistant Professor
Interests
Computational Linguistics and NLP, Robotics, Infrastructure Security, Machine Cognition, Neural Architectures, Theory of Deep Learning, Game Theory
Education
Vanderbilt University
2019-2024
Ph.D. Computer Science
- Dissertation Topic: “A Theoretical & Empirical Analysis of Language Model Behavior”
- Advisor: Doug Fisher
Tennessee Technological University
2014-2017
M.S. Electrical Engineering
- Thesis Topic: Machine Learning Improvement of Solar MPPT
2011-2014
B.S. Electrical Engineering
Faculty Experience
Tennessee Technological University
2024-Current
Assistant Professor
CSC 4320 (F2025) - Computer Architecture
CSC 2220 (F2025) - Artificial Intelligence for Everyone
CSC 4220/5220 (S2025) - Data Mining and ML
CSC 7970 (F2024 - F2025) - LLM Seminar
- Developed a course on LLMs. Surveys the important breakthroughs which have led to the emergence of large language models, their capabilities, and critical improvements.
Tennessee Technological University
2021-2024
Lecturer
ECE 3270 (S2020 - S2024) - PLC Lecture & Lab
- Developed OER lab manuals for teaching beginner PLC programming, emphasizing good coding practices.
ECE 4961 & 4971 (F2021 - S2024) - Capstone Design I and II
- Complete redevelopment of curriculum to facilitate assessment and sustainability.
ECE 3540 (F2023 - S2024) - Physical Electronics
Vanderbilt University
2020-2020
Instructor
CS 1101 (Su2020) - Programming and Problem Solving (Java Based)
Consulting
Gradient Consulting, Cookeville, Tennessee
Wilson Sports
2025 - 2026
Conducted full survey of the production process and analyzed it for automation and artificial intelligence opportunities. Developed a plan for retooling for the inclusion of automation and AI.
Industry Experience
ATC Automation, Cookeville, Tennessee
Senior Controls Engineer
2014 - 2021
Designed, oversaw build, and programmed automation equipment to meet customer requirements and exceed expectations while maintaining profitability. Total value of projects oversaw in excess of 20 million dollars.
Co-op Program Manager
2018 - 2020
Developed a co-op program to improve recruitment. Oversaw hiring, training, and management of co-op employees. Acted as the liaison for the building and maintenance of industrial/academic relations. Obtained a $100K industry lab grant.
Awards, Honors, and Grants
Tennessee Technological University
2025
Collaborative Research: Conference: NAIRR Pilot Expansion: FA1: Mid-South Conferences on CyberInfrastructure Advances to Enable Interdisciplinary AI Research in Health
- National Science Foundation Award - Award# 2526362 - $125,133 - PI: Anthony Skjellum - Co-PI: Jesse Roberts, Amr Hilal
2025
ERI: Data-Driven Expansion of Electrified Transportation Network
- National Science Foundation Award - Award# 2347337 - $195,769 - PI: Jesse Roberts
S2024
IEEE AESS Grant for the DARPA Triage Challenge
F2023
TnTech OER Development Grant
S2024
Nominated for the KEEN Foundation Rising Star Award
F2018
Vanderbilt Carnegie Fellowship
Vanderbilt University
Su2024
Received the Vanderbilt Award for Doctoral Discovery
S2024
Nominated for the CF Chen best paper award
S2021
Nominated for the Graduate Leadership Anchor Award
F2021
Received the American Bureau of Shipping merit Scholarship
Media Appearances
F2021
Interviewed on the radio about capstone project that leveraged ML to monitor parking lots.
S2025
Herold Citizen article regarding work to use large language models to preserve the Cherokee language: Article
S2025
104.7 Radio Interview regarding Cherokee preservation with AI
S2025
WBIR channel 10 Interview regarding Cherokee preservation with AI: Article
S2025
News channel 5 Nashville Interview with Forest Sanders regarding Cherokee preservation with AI Article
F2025
Interviewed by the Knoxville ledger regarding Cherokee preservation with AI: Article
Workshop Organization and Teaching
S2025
Classes without quizzes at TnTech CS - How do Language models work?
S2025
TnTech College of Engineering CAFE Workshop - Using LLMs in Research
Publications
- Hadlock, S., Roberts, J., & Lee, J. (2025). Enhancing Post Earnings Announcement Drift Measurement with Large Language Models. Proceedings of The 10th Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing.
- Matinez, Y. & Roberts, J. (2025). LLMs as Agentic Cooperative Players in Multiplayer UNO. International Conference on Machine Learning Applications 2025.
- Brown, E., Roberts, J., & Talbert, D. (2025). Toward the Use of LLMs to Support Curriculum Mapping to Established Frameworks. American Society of Engineering Education.
- Moore, K., Roberts, J., & Watson, D. (2025). Human-Alignment and Calibration of Inference-Time Uncertainty in Large Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.08204.
- Rentschler, M. & Roberts, J. (2025). Exploitation Is All You Need... for Exploration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01287.
- Eberle, W., Hilal, A., MacKenzie, A., Roberts, J., Skjellum, A., & Talbert, D. (2025). Tennessee Tech University: Action Plan for Artificial Intelligence Education, Workforce Development, Research, and Infrastructure Needs. .
- Moore, K., Roberts, J., Pham, T., & Fisher, D. (2025). Chain of thought still thinks fast: Apricot helps with thinking slow. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
- Moore, K., Roberts, J., Watson, D., & Wisniewski, P. (2025). Investigating Human-Aligned Large Language Model Uncertainty. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.12528.
- Sawyer, H., Roberts, J., & Moore, K. (2025). Basic Categories in Vision Language Models: Expert Prompting Doesn’t Grant Expertise. Advances in Cognitive Systems 2025.
- Rentschler, M. & Roberts, J. (2025). RL+ Transformer= A General-Purpose Problem Solver. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop for Research on Agent Language Models (REALM 2025).
- Hossain, S., Altarawneh, A., & Roberts, J. (2025). Leveraging Large Language Models and Machine Learning for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection. 2025 IEEE 15th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC).
- Roberts, J., Moore, K., & Fisher, D. (2025). Do Large Language Models Learn Human-Like Strategic Preferences?. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop for Research on Agent Language Models (REALM 2025).
- Umphrey, R., Roberts, J., & Roberts, L. (2024). Investigating Expert-in-the-Loop LLM Discourse Patterns for Ancient Intertextual Analysis. 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities.
- Roberts, J., Roberts, L., & Reed, A. (2024). Supporting the Digital Autonomy of Elders Through LLM Assistance. Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series.
- Roberts, J., Moore, K., Pham, T., Ewaleifoh, O., & Fisher, D. (2024). Large language model recall uncertainty is modulated by the fan effect. 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning.
- Moore, K., Roberts, J., Pham, T., Ewaleifoh, O., & Fisher, D. (2024). The base-rate effect on llm benchmark performance: Disambiguating test-taking strategies from benchmark performance. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024.
- Roberts, J. (2024). Introduction to PLC Automation. .
- Roberts, J. (2024). Do Large Language Models Learn to Human-Like Learn?. Proceedings of the AAAI 2024 Spring Symposium Series.
- Roberts, J., Moore, K., Wilenzick, D., & Fisher, D. (2024). Using artificial populations to study psychological phenomena in neural models. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
- Roberts, J. (2023). How Powerful are Decoder-Only Transformer Neural Models?. 2024 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).
- Roberts, J. (2021). Finding an Equilibrium in the Traveler's Dilemma with Fuzzy Weak Domination. 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG).
- Roberts, J. & Fisher, D. (2020). pReview: The artificially intelligent conference reviewer. 2020 19th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA).
- Roberts, J. & Fisher, D. (2020). Extending the Philosophy of Computational Criticism.. ICCC.
- Roberts, J. & Talbert, D. (2019). Biologically Extending the Gen 2 ANN Model.. FLAIRS.
- Roberts, J. & Bhattacharya, I. (2017). Improving any arbitrary MPPT hill climber with ANN estimations. 2017 IEEE 44th Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC).
- Roberts, J. & Bhattacharya, I. (2016). MNFIS and other soft computing based MPPT techniques: A comparative analysis. 2016 IEEE 43rd Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC).
Presentations
May 2025
Poster: A Few-Shot Learning Method for SMS Phishing Detection and Explanation Using SLMs
Seyed Mohammad Sanjari, Jesse Roberts, Mir Mehedi A. Pritom
Professional Memberships
2023 - Current
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
2024 - Current
Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL)
2021 - Current
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
2024 - Current
Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS)
Faculty Service
Tennessee Technological University
Fall 2021 - Current
Undergraduate Program Committee
Spring 2022 - Current
ACME Building Design College Committee
Fall 2021 - Current
ABET Assessment Departmental Committee
Fall 2022 - Current
Founding Advisor to the Rock Climbing Club
Fall 2021 - Current
IEEE Robotics Team Coach
Research Service
2025
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
2025
12th Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems
2025
Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
2025
Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
2025
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
2025
Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium (FLAIRS)
2025
Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL)
2025
Behavioral Sciences Journal
2025
Research on Agent Language Models (REALM) at ACL
2024
Session Chair for World Congress on Computational Intelligence
2024
Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
2024
EPJ Data Science Journal
2024
Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
2022-2025
International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
2022-2024
IEEE Conference on Games (AI & Game Theory)
Teaching Assistant Experience
Vanderbilt University
S2021
Project in Artificial Intelligence
F2020
Programming and Problem Solving (Java Based)
S2020
Compiler Construction
F2019
Database Management Systems
Research Assistant Experience
Vanderbilt University
Su2021
Researched computational sustainability
- Funded by NSF Grant No. 1521672
Graduate Courses Taken
Vanderbilt University
F2020
CS6388 - Model Integrated Computing
F2020
CS8395 - Neurodiversity Inspired Science & Engineering
S2020
CS6360 - Advanced Artificial Intelligence
S2020
CS5260 - Artificial Intelligence
F2019
CS6362 - Advanced Machine Learning
F2019
CS8395 - Computation & Cognition
Tennessee Technological University
F2018
CSC6903 - Learning Theory
S2018
CSC7980 - Stock Market Prediction Models
S2018
FIN6020 - Financial Management
F2017
CSC7240 - Intelligent Information Systems
F2016
CSC6903 - Advanced Reverse Engineering
F2016
ECE6580 - Instrument Transducer Technology
F2015
ECE6900 - Intelligent System Design
S2015
ECE6040 - Signal Analysis
S2015
ECE6250 - Random Signals & Systems
F2014
ECE6170 - High Performance Embedded System Design
F2014
ECE6200 - Linear Systems Analysis
F2014
ECE6600 - Computer Methods for Power System Analysis
Languages
- English (Native proficiency)
- Spanish (Elementary proficiency)
- Irish (Elementary proficiency)