curriculum vitæ
Professional Experience
Sr. Computational Linguist (L5) @ Google (Remote)
2024-Present
Developing end-to-end brand safety solutions using ML modeling, GenAI, human computation and data science
- Leading R&D projects that apply LLMs to complex semantic and visual classification problems
- Ensuring that the Google Display Ads network to ensure that the is web fairly monetized and accessible for everybody
Research Associate @ University of Memphis: Institute for Intelligent Systems
2023-Present
Collaborating on research projects related to NLP and LLMs in the medical and financial domains
- Completed first draft of a book under contract with MIT Press ("Language Technologies for Beginners")
- Co-authored journal articles on medical NLP / ML and language patterns in ChatGPT and human-produced text
Analytical Linguist @ Google (Los Angeles, CA)
2017-2023
Architecte experiments to address research questions about advertising quality
Conducted statistical analyses on human evaluation data using R and Python
Developed interfaces to collect labeled data from a global rater workforce
Senior Data Scientist @ NarrativeWave (Irvine, CA)
2016-2017
Developed Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application using statistical modeling and natural language generation
Appliedlinguistic and statistical expertise to language generation for large, industrial machine analytics
Built forecasting models for sensor data using Python and R
Senior Data Scientist @ Tata Consultancy Services (Bentonville, AR)
2015-2016
Developed statistical modeling pipeline in R for business analytics
Mined big socio-demographic and transaction data for actionable insights
Standardized data science and analytics procedures for the world's largest retailer
Voice Engineer at Nuance Communications, Text-to-Speech R&D (Merelbeke, Belgium)
2013-2015
Mastered relevant R&D technical skills, including a complex, evolving speech synthesis environment
Collaborated with distributed, multi-national team to build 2 voices for well-known digital personal assistant
Provided linguistic expertise and took on major customer-facing role for reboot of the world's most heard synthetic voice
Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington
2009-2013
Initiated collaborative, multidisciplinary research resulting in publications, conference presentations and well-received funding applications
Led a team that revamped the sequence of beginners’ French classes
Taught French linguistics, French phonetics / phonology and pedagogy
Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2002-2009
Completed a dissertation project on mental linguistic maps and socio-phonetic perception in Parisian French
Taught French courses resulting in inclusion on excellent teacher list
Coordinated human resources, material creation and student outcome management for elementary and French phonetics classes
Education
Certificate in Machine Learning (Coursera Specialization)
Working through 8 comprehensive courses on scaleable machine learning algorithms with NLP applications in Python
Coursera Data Science Specialization
Online coursework in R Programming, Exploratory Data Analysis, Statistical Inference, Regression Models, Developing Data Products and Practical Machine Learning
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Department of French (Linguistics)
MA & Ph.D. - "Perceptions of Parisian French: From Language Attitudes to Speech Perception"
Furman University
BA in French and Political Science
Technical Skills
Artificial Languages: R, Python, SQL
Statistical Computation and Graphical Software: R (RStudio), Python (Jupyter Notebook), Octave, SPSS
Big Data Utilities: Hive, Spark
Version Control: Git (Github), Subversion
Web Design Software: Shiny (web application framework for RStudio), HTML, CSS, XML
Acoustic Analysis Software: PRAAT, Akustyk, Cool Edit Pro, Audition, Nuance Vocalizer
Human Subject Research Software: DmDX, Matlab
Working knowledge of EEG recording and analysis
Natural Languages
Native / Near-native: English, French
Highly Proficient: Spanish
Conversational: Serbo-Croatian, German, Portuguese, Italian
Elementary: Dutch, Tamil
Reading Knowledge: Latin