KEVIN HOFFMAN

Visionary
AI for
human
futures.

AI Engineer at The Philadelphia Inquirer. I build production systems that bring natural language to journalism — archives, audiences, and infrastructure that lasts.

$ whoami
kevin@inquirer  ~  AI Engineer

$ ls projects/
dewey/        ← digital librarian
aggregator/   ← hyperlocal media
xai/          ← explainable AI

$ cat status.txt
Open to bleeding-edge
AI roles. Let's talk.
7+
Conference talks
incl. Int'l
3
Major newsrooms
adopted Dewey
47
Years of archive
made searchable
01

Featured Work

Dewey
Live in Production
Project 01

Dewey

The Inquirer's Digital Librarian

A conversational AI interface that lets journalists and editors query 47 years of the Inquirer's article archive in plain English — and receive cited, sourced answers in natural language. Built on a multi-agent RAG architecture. Read more →

Now running at The Baltimore Banner and The Seattle Times — adopted independently by two major newsrooms.
RAGMulti-AgentOpenAI Agents SDKAzure AI SearchPython
[ aggregator.gif ]
drop your screen recording here
Press Coverage
Project 02

Local Media Aggregator

Hyperlocal newsletters at scale

An AI-powered aggregator enabling the Inquirer to produce hyperlocal newsletters for communities across the Philadelphia region that were previously out of reach — surfacing relevant local stories automatically.

Featured in a Wall Street Journal article on AI in local journalism.
NLPAutomationContent StrategyNewsletter Infra
02

About

I'm an AI Engineer with a background in Explainable AI— the discipline of making machine learning systems transparent, interpretable, and trustworthy. I've spent the last few years applying that foundation inside one of America's most storied newsrooms, building production systems that let language models do real, consequential work.

“The most powerful AI systems are the ones that show their work.”

My work spans the full stack: indexing pipelines, retrieval architectures, agentic systems, and the UX that makes AI legible to non-technical stakeholders. I care deeply about the gap between a model that performs well on benchmarks and one that earns trust in production.

I'm now looking for my next chapter — roles at the frontier of applied AI where interpretability, reliability, and real-world impact aren't afterthoughts.

Core Expertise
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Multi-Agent System Design
  • Explainable AI & Interpretability
  • Azure AI Search & Cognitive Services
  • OpenAI Platform (Agents SDK, Responses API)
  • NLP Evaluation (BLEU, METEOR, GLEU)
  • Python · Data Engineering · API Design
  • Journalism Technology
03

Speaking

May 2026

Hacks Hackers

Perugia, Italy Why You Should Use AI to Monitor Local Meetings

Apr 2026

🇮🇹International Journalism Festival

Perugia, Italy Steal This: AI Projects Newsrooms Actually Shipped (and How They Got It Over the Line)

Jan 2026

National Journalism + AI Accelerator

Phoenix, AZ Steal This Idea

Oct 2025

INMA Generative AI Initiative

Generative AI In The Newsroom

Sep 2025

ONA25

New Orleans, LA Steak This Code: AI Projects you can use today

May 2025

Hacks Hackers

Baltimore, MD Making an AI tool that people will actually use