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University of Michigan     (September 2009 - present)

I am now an Assistant Associate Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.


University of Washington     (September 2005 - September 2009)

I'm heading back to grad school to get my PhD.... and I'm done... :)


HP Information Dynamics Laboratory     (February 2001 - September 2005)

As of February 2001 I'm at the HP Information Dynamics Laboratory. Among other things, I am working on a system called SHOCK (Social Harvesting of Community Knowledge). You can see slides from a talk I gave here: HTML or (animated) PPT

I've also started working a little on bioinformatics related issues relating to mining textual data for biological information.


Xerox Palo Alto Research Center     (July 1998 - February 2001)

I joined PARC in July of 1998 after graduating from MIT. I started my work in the Quantitative Content Analysis (QCA) area of the Information Sciences and Technologies Lab. While in QCA I developed a the Pipes toolkit for composing new Information Retrieval systems. The system, written entirely in Java, allowed you to rapidly prototype new and interesting IR systems (including pre-processing, indexing, and retrieval).

My interest in internet work led me to work with the Internet Ecologies Area (IEA). There I was able to leverage my computer background and economics interest to work on interesting characterization studies (such as free riding on Gnutella and social networks), as well as design new mechanisms that leverage this knowledge.

I worked on a bunch of other projects as well (PicturePiper, etc.) which you can read about in the publications page.

In addition to working with QCA and IEA I also was one of the founding members of Groupfire, or as it is now called Outride. For a few months I worked on both developing the technology and business strategy of the company, serving as the interim VP for Business Development. Raising capital and trying to get customers was an interesting change.


Laboratory for Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT
Project Haystack     (January 1996 - May 1998)

When I was at MIT I worked on a Personal Information Retrieval system called Haystack. With Haystack you can index everything on your machine (although that's probably a little optimistic). You can annotate the resulting data with your own comments like, "this is a really interesting paper." Soon, we'll have methods in place to do queries like, "get all postscript files, that I thought were 'interesting' and that have the word thingamajig that were written between 10/1/97 and 10/5/97." Well, it might not be as "natural" as that, but it'll be close. This will be an improvement on both databases (which have no notion of fuzzy, i.e. they can't do useful things like ranking responses), and IR systems (which have no notion of exact, i.e. they can't tell you if something was written between two dates, just if the document contains a specific date).

The system was intended to learn gradually from your queries, and provide you with the facility query other people's Haystacks. Learning is provided by doing things like tracing your queries as you search for something (first you search for "apple" and the "apple computers" and then "apple newton pda"). When you find what you are looking for the full trace is added to the object allowing you to jump to the end whenever you use any query in the path.

For my work on Haystack I was awarded the Anna Pogosyants UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities) Award. I am very honored to have been nominated for the award, let alone winning it.


Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT
Library 2000     (October 1993 - November 1995)

"Library 2000 is a computer systems research project that is exploring the implications of large-scale on-line storage using the future electronic library as an example."

During my time at Library 2000 I worked on a number of projects including automatic indexing and conversion of various bibliographic records through a customized WAIS client.

My main efforts for Library 2000 were centered around an algorithim for producing relevance matching between two documents (or a query and a document) using repeated boolean searches. Basically what we have accomplished is a way to create links on the fly so that users browsing through a document, upon finding something of interest can merely click and have our system find the closest match within the library. In 1995 we presented a paper on this work, and in 1998 I received a patent on the algorithm.


Non-research work
Agency.com     (November 1995 - May 1997)

For a while I consulted for Agency.com, doing various projects for clients such as Metlife, American Express, GTE, Hitachi, and British Airways.

CDMe Technologies     (October 1995 - November 1996)

In 1995 I co-founded an on-demand CD publishing company. The idea was that users could come into the site, deposit a bunch of URLs, we would retrieve the data, burn it onto a CD, and send it back to the user. I designed and implemented most of the technical aspects of the system. It was an interesting, if short, first foray into the world of start-ups.

Trilogy Development Group/pcOrder     (June 1995 - November 1995)

I worked as both a consultant and intern for Trilogy/pcOrder where I developed an automated testing framework as well as one of the first prototypes of pcOrder's web interface.


MIT Floorplan Server

This server which I created for fun holds a web interface to all the MIT floorplans. It's still used by a lot of MIT people. The system is pretty neat (shameless plug). If you're in the MIT network you can take a look at it here (guessing this is no longer up).