Jim Ashe, PhD

Mathematics Content · Applied AI for Education · Assessment

Mathematician and 20-year educator. I author mathematics content in LaTeX — full courses, competency-based assessments, standardized-exam items — and build applied AI for education: a retrieval-grounded course assistant with human-in-the-loop feedback tooling, and rubric-based quality gates for assessment. The through-line is measurement — deciding what counts as correct, then holding both student work and AI outputs to that standard.

Selected work

A few projects that show how I author mathematics content and build the AI and data systems around it — with an emphasis on measurement, correctness, and responsible data handling.

Course FAQ Bot Framework

A reusable, config-driven framework for turning any course's materials into an evaluated, privacy-safe RAG assistant — with human-in-the-loop feedback tooling and an evaluation loop. Proven end-to-end on a university capstone.

RAGLLM evaluationprivacy-by-designPython

Mathematics Content Portfolio

Two decades of authored math content: nine full university course archives with editable LaTeX source, recent activity-style practice sets, and expository talks with animated slide sequences — Cauchy rigidity, the Art Gallery Theorem, Cantor's infinities.

content authoringLaTeXassessmentteaching

C964 Capstone Course Site

A live Jupyter Book course site for WGU's Computer Science capstone — task-by-task guidance with complete worked machine-learning examples for classification and regression, used by the students it was built for.

coursewareJupyter BookteachingML

Metric-Validity Counterexamples

Monte-Carlo existence proofs of how a single aggregate metric can mislead across populations — a literal Simpson's paradox, throughput-driven metric deflation, and non-uniform optimal effort allocation, with symbolic verification.

measurementstatisticsevaluationPython

CaseloadNotes

A Windows desktop app that automates the repetitive Salesforce/Outlook workflow of running a course caseload — batch actions across filtered students, templated email/text, at-rest encryption, a test suite, and a packaged build.

applied softwarePythondesktopautomation

CirclePack · contributor

Open-source research software for the creation, manipulation, and display of circle packings (in the sense of Thurston) — tied to my published mathematics on generalized branching.

math researchJavaopen source

Background

  • PhD, Mathematics — University of Tennessee (advisor: Ken Stephenson).
  • Published in The Journal of Analysis · arXiv:1607.03404 · Google Scholar.
  • 20+ years teaching mathematics, computer science, and data analytics — gateway and corequisite math at an HBCU and a small private university, and a large, diverse online student body at a mastery-based university.
  • Authored competency-based performance assessments — with evidence-to-objective mapping, separable rubrics, and objective quality gates — for WGU's BS in AI Engineering; professional item-writing for standardized mathematics exams (ETS Praxis, NES).
  • Focused on AI-assisted content authoring, assessment design, and evaluation. Always happy to talk shop about math pedagogy or eval methodology.