I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow at the ETH Zürich AI Center, where I sit in both natural language processing/machine learning and social science groups.
I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, where I was based in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing lab. My wonderful advisor was Philip Resnik.
My research is oriented around the development and evaluation of methods for computational social science. My basic contention is that the field of NLP is well-served served by grounding it in the needs of social science—giving direction to concepts like interpretability and generalization. On the methods side, I'm interested in identifying latent constructs (perhaps call it "very abstractive summarization"): topic models, ideal points models, NLG for annotation. In terms of evaluation, I like to think about validity: are we really measuring what we want to measure? Topically, I'm drawn to work on bias & fairness and political science; more recently, I've started work on constructs in mental health, specifically those relating to suicidality. If this sounds at all interesting to you and you'd like to work together: please reach out!
During the PhD, I interned with both the FATE group at Microsoft Research and AllenNLP at AI2. Before the PhD, I completed my master's in computational statistics and machine learning at University College London, where my thesis advisors were Sebastian Riedel and Jeff Mitchell at the UCL NLP group.
After undergrad, I was a Research Analyst at The Brattle Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I built econometric models, developed a document retrieval platform, and did additional work that could be classified as data science. In my most interesting project, I helped conduct research on New York City public housing for the U.S. Department of Justice; these efforts eventually led to a $2.2 billion settlement to improve conditions.
You can reach me at firstname.lastname@ai.ethz.ch. I use masculine pronouns.