Technical Skills

• Programming languages — Python, Java, groovy, PHP, Perl, R, and BASH

• Natural Language Processing — Information Retrieval (lucene, solr, elasticsearch), supervised classification (log-linear models, SVM), named entity recognition and parsing (HMM, CRF, PCFG)

• Deep Learning — TensorFlow, Theano, Keras, BLSTM, seq2seq, word2vec

• Automated Speech Recognition VoiceXML, ECMAscript, SRGS and JSGF grammars

• Acoustic analysis — spectral and formant analysis using Praat, Matlab, and R

• Big Data — Hadoop architecture (Cloudera Manager), ETL ( Kafka, Flume), analytics (Hive, Impala, Spark)

• Statistics — t-test, correlations, ANOVA, multiple regression, logistic regression, monte-carlo, and bootstrapping, using python and R

• Web development — html, css, javascript, jQuery, WordPress, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, XML

• Source content management — git, Subversion, mercurial

Experience

• Nuance Communications (renamed to Cerence Oct. 2019)

  • Principal Research Scientist — 2016–present

    • Implementing new features and improved accuracy for natural language understanding for German localization of automotive virtual assistant

    • Developing internal tools for accuracy analysis and reporting in python and groovy

• Automattic

  • Data Engineer / Scientist — 2015–2016

    • Created tools for better monitoring and alerting of Hadoop ecosystem

    • Developed complex queries for business analytics

    • Built visualization tools and dashboards for internal customers

    • Led team of 3 developers

• Nuance Communications

  • Senior Research Engineer — 2014–2015

    • Technical lead for project to create media knowledge base to support personal assistants

    • Created solr indices from a collection of sources to support searching of music, movies, and tv shows for 13 locales

    • Improved search relevancy by performing experiments and developing tools to tune Lucene parameters.

  • Research Engineer — 2011–2014

    • Technical lead developing natural language understanding for tv-based dialogue system, using a UIMA-based pipeline with a combination of statistical and grammar-based components for 8 languages

    • Performed experiments for measuring and improving accuracy on millions of utterances using sun grid engine

    • Provided analytics for usage data using a combination of BASH, python, and R

  • Speech Scientist — 2010–2011

    • Created SRGS grammars for automated telephony systems

    • Performed speech recognition experiments to improve performance of enterprise intelligent interactive voice response applications

    • Developed and improved internal tools to improve workflow efficiency in BASH, Perl, python, and Java

• Lecturer in Linguistics — University of Colorado – Boulder, 2009

  • Taught Introduction to Computational Corpus Linguistics

  • Topics include regular expressions, part of speech tagging, and word frequency analyses using python

• Adjunct professor of Linguistics — Indiana University, 2008

  • Taught Introduction to programming for computational linguists

  • Topics included UNIX basics, regular expressions, searching corpora and databases, using python

• Post-doctoral fellow — Indiana University, 2007–2009

  • Carried out a large-scale investigation of spoken word recognition of English.

  • Designed and implemented novel error analyses using perl, python, and R, including monte-carlo simulations of behavioral data.

  • Developed a new clinical screening test of speech recognition for cochlear implant candidates

• Phonetics lab research assistant — University of Michigan, 2004–2005

  • Assisted on Dr. José Benkí’s project Measuring context effects in spoken word recognition.

  • Managed and mentored four undergraduate research assistants

  • Performed acoustic analysis and editing of stimuli for speech perception experiments

  • Created custom stimulus presentation software and data analysis software using Matlab

Education

University of Michigan

• Ph.D. in Linguistics and Germanic Languages & Literatures — May, 2007

  • Dissertation: Context Effects in Spoken Word Recognition of English and German by Native and Non-native Listeners

  • taught five undergraduate courses, including the first four semesters of German, and Introduction to Linguistics

• M.A. in Linguistics — January 2005

  • Thesis: The Ongoing (Un)merging of Stops in the Swabian Dialect of Isny im Allgäu

Grinnell College

• B.A. in German, with honors — December, 2000

• Semester Abroad in Munich, Germany — Spring, 1999

Online Courses

• Mining Massive Datasets— Coursera, from Jeff Ulman, Stanford University — November, 2014

• Machine Learning — Coursera, from Andrew Ng, Stanford University — May, 2014

• Natural Language Processing — Coursera, from Michael Collins, Columbia University — May, 2013

Selected Publications

• Misperceptions of spoken words: Data from a random sample of American English words in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134 (1), 572–585 (2013), with Tom Gruenenfelder, Adam Buchwald, and David B. Pisoni. pdf Copyright (2013) Acoustical Society of America. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America.

• Adaptation to frozen babble in spoken word recognition in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125 (3), EL93–EL97 (2009), with. Adam Buchwald, and David B. Pisoni.

• Confusion patterns and response bias in spoken word recognition of German disyllabic words and nonwords, in Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, 1957–1960. .pdf (2007)

Languages

• Fluent in English and German

• Linguistic knowledge of Spanish (particular phonetic and phonological), as well as rudimentary speaking skills

Awards

• Nuance Chairman’s club recipient — 2012

• Candidacy Fellowship (awarded by the Linguistics department) — 2005

• Regents Fellowship from the University of Michigan — 2001

• Phi Beta Kappa Member — 2001

• Trustee Merit scholarship from Grinnell College — 1997–2000