I am a software engineer, specializing in information and interaction design for visualizing and editing structured data, with knowledge in semantic graphs and hands-on experience related to Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.

I studied at the University of Waterloo and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I currently live and work in the San Francisco Bay area. This is me on LinkedIn; contact me at hover to read.

You might know me from some of my work during my time at MIT CSAIL, specifically the SIMILE Timeline widget (2005), the SIMILE Exhibit library (2006), and a few other academic publications.

My work on Freebase while at Metaweb yielded Freebase Parallax (2008) (screencast, coverage on ZDNet, ReadWrite, The Noisy Channel, Well-Formed Data, etc.) Much of Parallax was lost, but a bit of its spirit lived on in Google's Knowledge Graph Carousel feature launched in August 2012, supporting list-seeking queries.

While at Metaweb I also created Freebase Gridworks (2009), which got rebranded as Google Refine (2010), and subsequently OpenRefine (2012, see its history). It is being taught and used widely among librarians and data journalists (courses/tutorials by IBM's Big Data University, School of data, Duke University, Rice University, etc.). There is much love for it, though resources for its open-source development are lacking.

I am currently working in Research / Machine Intelligence at Google. I focus on designing and building platforms and tools for linguistic data annotation, playing my part in solving the fundamental research problem of Natural Language Understanding.

— January 2016