Donald Stuart Black
- E-mail
- trurl at freeshell.org
- Web site
- http://trurl.freeshell.org/
Educational Background
Brown University — Sc.M, computer science
- Duration
- June 2008-May 2010
- Location
- Providence, RI
Attained ScM (Master's degree) in computer science at Brown
University. Primary topics of interest were natural language
processing and machine learning. Master's project was to adapt a
split-merge constituency parser to the form-function labeling
task.
Cornell University — B.A., Linguistics
- Duration
- August 2002-May 2006
- Location
- Ithaca, NY
Studied computer science, linguistics, and the Russian language as a full-time
student at Cornell University. Graduated in May 2006 from the School of Arts
and Sciences with a B.A. in linguistics and a secondary concentration in
information science.
Academic Research Experience
Brown University — Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing (BLLIP)
- Duration
- June 2008-June 2010
- Location
- Providence, RI
Worked in BLLIP, a graduate research group in the Brown computer
science department. Primary research subjects were language
modeling, topic modeling, and extensions to the Berkeley parser
to learn semantic role labels. While in this group, I acquired
an interest in the general application of machine learning to
robotics and other real-world systems.
Cornell University — Russian House resident
- Duration
- Fall/Winter/Spring 2004-2005, 2005-2006
- Location
- Ithaca, NY; Moscow, Russia; and St. Petersburg, Russia
Resident of Cornell University's Russian House, which provided an environment
for intense study of the Russian language by placing students of the language
in living conditions with native speakers and other students.
This residency included a research project in Moscow and St. Petersburg,
organized entirely by students in the Russian House and paid for by various
departments at Cornell University. The project sought to examine changes in
Russian society as a result of the fall of the USSR through interviews with
artists and teachers. A subtitled DVD was compiled from the several hours of
interviews, and excerpts from the interviews were showcased for faculty at
Cornell.
Employment History
Google — Software engineer
- Duration
- May 2014-present
- Location
- Boston, MA
Working with a tight-knit team to Web search results with an
extraction-oriented question answering system.
Raytheon BBN Technologies — Staff scientist
- Duration
- May 2012-April 2014
- Location
- Boston, MA
Staff scientist at BBN. Major projects:
- Metaphor extraction over Web corpora in a minimally
supervised setting, via topic modeling with LDA, under the
IARPA Metaphor program
- Affect analysis of political speech in a lightly supervised
setting
- Processing and ingestion of U.S. and Chinese scientific
literature for prediction of trends in technology, with the
goal of identifying useful features for predicting citation
counts under the IARPA FUSE program
Localot/dMetrics — NLP researcher and software engineer
- Duration
- June 2010-March 2012
- Location
- Boston, MA
Research scientist and engineer at startup dMetrics. Within a
tight-knit group of researchers and engineers, applied
state-of-the-art NLP techniques to large-scale datasets across
many domains.
Typical research tasks:
- Large-scale topic modeling for corpus exploration
- Prototyping an active learning system for named entity
recognition on new domains
Other responsibilities:
- Development of a general large-scale NLP platform which
handled data from acquisition through training, inference,
and production
- Data exploration on top of Amazon Elastic Map-Reduce to
support new product development
- Upkeep of company IT structure in the cloud (CentOS and
Debian GNU/Linux on Amazon EC2) and locally (FreeBSD)
- Maintenance and development of Java libraries used by other
company researchers for experiments and data collection
- Building and maintaining JNI bindings for FreeLing, a C++ NLP
library
- Assessing company hiring needs, planning new engineering
positions, developing hiring criteria, and conducting
interviews
W. W. Norton & Company — Web services administrator
- Duration
- June 2006-February 2008
- Location
- New York, NY
Web services administrator at W. W. Norton & Company,
administering and developing services for employees and
customers. Administrative responsibilities included:
- Upkeep of user accounts on internal development and
production machines
- Administration of IIS 5/6 and SQL Server 2000/2005 under
Windows 2000/2003
- Migration from IIS 5/SQL Server 2000 to IIS 6/SQL Server 2005 for
wwnorton.com Web sites
- Administration and configuration of Apache, MySQL, and Subversion under
Redhat and CentOS
- Migration from Redhat 7 to CentOS 4 for high-bandwidth Web
media on media.wwnorton.com
Development responsibilities encompassed building new Web
applications and the improvement of long-standing
practices. They included:
- Documentation of maintenance and development practices in a
central, indexed location
- Deployment of an independent testing environment away from
live Web content
- Introduction of centralized version control and rollout of a trial
installation of Subversion for Web development
- Development of small, independent Web applications and administrative
scripts in Perl
- Collaboration with company developers and designers in choice and
trial deployment of the Ektron CMS400.NET content management system
Managerial responsibilities included:
- Overseeing and directing freelance programming teams working on Web
applications in ASP.NET and LAMP (PHP) environments
- Planning a new Web application to serve as an internal library for
electronic media
- Examination of current use of IT resources in order to predict future need
and recommending purchases to accommodate that need
W. W. Norton & Company — Emedia intern
- Duration
- May-June 2006
- Location
- New York, NY
Developed an in-house embedded application to be used by a
traveling sales force when gathering marketing data. This
entailed:
- Selecting a software platform for the application client (ultimately
settling on Java CLDC/MIDP)
- Developing the client codebase until usability testing of the GUI could be
done
- Limited usability testing of the client GUI in the field
Cornell University — Cornell Information Technology helpdesk consultant
- Duration
- 2004-2006
- Location
- Ithaca, NY
Provided technical support to university students and faculty over the phone
and in person. Support tasks included:
- Troubleshooting of diverse problems with student and faculty personal
computers running Windows 2000 and XP, particularly cleaning of viruses and
spyware
- Support for university-provided software, including anti-virus tools,
E-mail clients, and university-specific timeclock and class reservation
applications
- Support for university residential network access
National Computer Camps — Teacher and counselor
- Duration
- Summer 2000
- Location
- Fairfield, CT
Acted as a live-in camp counselor for children ages 8-15 in a yearly
independent program on the Sacred Heart University campus. Taught programming
in Java and QBASIC, including basic algorithms and GUI building. Supervised up
to two dozen children at once engaged in group or individual programming and
learning activities.
Professional skills
- Natural languages
- English (life-long native speaker)
- Russian (4 years of undergraduate study)
- Spanish (5 years of study in secondary school)
- Mandarin (rudimentary skills but quite willing to learn more; 1/2-year
intensive study at FALCON)
- Programming languages
- Emacs LISP, C, C++, Rust, Java,
Clojure, Scala, Perl, Python, *NIX shell scripting, SQL,
HTML/CSS