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ClelandCo —— Status: RunningSpecial Forces medic turned AI engineer

I get AI systems from prototype to production.

I help funded teams and local operators turn brittle demos, stalled models, and invisible digital presence into reliable systems people can use.

No fabricated case studies. No hype without measurements.

/ operating principle

Diagnose. Define done. Build. Handoff.

Battlefield medicine taught outcome ownership under constraint. AI engineering turned that into systems that are measured, monitored, and reliable.

15
years in uniform
8
years in Special Operations
2025
M.S. Artificial Intelligence
1.81x
ONNX latency improvement
See measured proof
Two paths

Same discipline, different buyer.

The startup buyer is buying production AI judgment. The local service buyer is buying a clear path from online invisibility to more calls.

For funded startups

Prototype to Production AI

Founders and CTOs with a model that works in a demo but stalls before launch.

A production-ready AI service with clear acceptance metrics, monitoring hooks, latency and cost controls, and a handoff your team can operate.

See MLOps offer

For service businesses

Local Visibility Systems

Local operators starting in one market, with a model that can scale by niche or region.

Website, Google profile, schema, reviews, and local search fixes that turn searches into calls.

See visibility offer

Operator credibility

Special Forces discipline, applied to shipping AI.

I spent over a decade in U.S. Army Special Forces as an 18D Special Forces medic. That work teaches one thing above everything else: own the outcome.

I brought that to AI. The result is a practical bias toward systems that can be measured, deployed, monitored, and handed off without drama.

Special Forces medic

Outcome ownership, triage, and calm execution when plans meet reality.

M.S. Artificial Intelligence

Graduate AI training across ML, algorithms, NLP, vision, and reinforcement learning.

Production systems focus

The work after the demo: data discipline, evals, monitoring, deployment, cost, and latency.

Remote from Michigan

Senior production judgment without coastal overhead or agency bloat.

Measured proof

See the discipline before you hire it.

A self-contained proof-of-work repo takes a model from notebook to containerized service to edge-optimized artifact, with real benchmark numbers.

Measured CPU inference benchmark by model variant
VariantMeanP95Size
PyTorch eager (fp32)0.122 ms0.128 ms811.2 KB
ONNX Runtime (fp32)0.067 ms0.072 ms810.3 KB
ONNX Runtime (int8 quantized)0.058 ms0.060 ms221.6 KB

What it demonstrates

Notebook to live service.

  • Train, export to ONNX, then int8 dynamic quantization.
  • 1.81x lower mean latency moving PyTorch eager to ONNX Runtime.
  • 3.66x smaller artifact after quantization.
  • FastAPI service with health endpoint, prediction endpoint, structured logs, and latency headers.
View code profile →
How engagements work

A lightweight process for serious outcomes.

The goal is not to create a consulting theater. The goal is to find the gap, agree on done, close it, and leave the system operable.

Step 01

Diagnose

Find the gap using evidence, not vague AI or SEO claims.

For AI systems, that means model, data, evals, deployment, monitoring, latency, and cost. For local visibility, that means website, Google profile, schema, reviews, and search-to-call paths.

Proof and thinking

Projects and writing that show the work.

Public, runnable examples of the technical range behind the consulting practice.

/ featured projects

PlantDoc — Plant Disease Classification

CBAM-augmented ResNet18 for 38 plant disease categories. 97.46% accuracy, 99.21% precision, 99.17% recall on the test set.

97.46%
Accuracy
99.21%
Precision
99.17%
Recall
Computer VisionPyTorchAttentionResNet

Real-Time Parking Optimization System

Dynamic pricing, A* routing with traffic, and ML demand prediction across 113 zones in downtown Grand Rapids. Sub-100ms response.

<100ms
Response
10,000+
Concurrency
113
Zones
AlgorithmsGame TheoryA*Urban Planning

Sepsis Prediction Pipeline

Early-warning ML pipeline for sepsis detection. XGBoost, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression with hyperparameter tuning via Optuna.

0.9998
XGBoost AUROC
0.9760
RF AUROC
0.8955
LR AUROC
Healthcare AIXGBoostOptunaPython

HMER — Image to LaTeX Converter

Sequence-to-sequence model that transcribes images of mathematical expressions to LaTeX. CNN/ResNet encoder + LSTM decoder.

62.56%
Accuracy
0.1539
BLEU
Deep LearningComputer VisionPyTorchSeq2Seq

From Notebook to Edge — Proof of Work

Self-contained ClelandCo demo: train a small CNN, export to ONNX, int8 dynamic quantization, FastAPI service. 1.81× lower latency, 3.66× smaller artifact.

1.81×
Latency
3.66×
Size
MLOpsONNXFastAPIQuantization

/ writing

Edge AI18 min

AI at the Operator's Edge

How edge AI is transforming special operations: tactical-level data processing, human-machine teaming, and decision-making at the front lines — insights from a Green Beret turned AI developer.

Applied AI15 min

AI-Driven Medical Triage & Diagnosis

What battlefield protocols (MARCH/PAWS) and explainable AI together teach about accountable systems under pressure — from a Special Forces medic turned AI engineer.

MLOps10 min

Why AI Prototypes Stall Before Production

The model is rarely the whole problem. The gap is usually data discipline, evals, deployment, cost, and monitoring — and that gap is what most projects underestimate.

Coming soon
Trust and boundaries

Serious work, plainly scoped.

The brand should feel technical and grounded because the work is technical and grounded.

What I will not do

  • No fabricated outcomes or fake case studies.
  • No mass-spam outreach tooling.
  • No AI claims without measurable proof.
  • No vague retainers without scope and expectations.

What you can expect

  • Evidence before opinion.
  • A written definition of done before build work.
  • Documentation and handoff as part of the deliverable.
  • Pricing tied to outcomes, not theater.

Start with the gap

Have a model stuck before production, or a business customers cannot find?

Tell me where the system is breaking. I will tell you straight whether I can help, what the first paid step should be, and what not to waste money on.