Work Experience
New York, NY (remote) & Cambridge, MA
Dec. 2023 – Oct. 2024
Salesforce
Senior Machine Learning Scientist
Aug. 2022 – Nov. 2023
Senior Software Engineer
Nov. 2019 – July 2022
Software Engineer
- Acqui-hired by Salesforce in fall of 2019 as part of acquisition of Diffeo
- Presented data science results to top executives to demonstrate product launch readiness for Salesforce's Einstein Relationship Insights (ERI)
- Implemented key ERI models for discovering useful relationships from unstructured data sources
- Designed and implemented in-house microservice for serving ML predictions
- Spearheaded a data curation team to build datasets used for training ML models, evaluating product quality, and motivating other product improvements
- Implemented tooling for automatic quantitative evaluations of ERI
Cambridge, MA
Jan. 2018 – Oct. 2019
Diffeo
Software Engineer
- Improved Diffeo's primary entity coreference model, including cross-lingual predictions
- Stewarded the standardization of coreference resolution in different parts of the system
- Implemented locality sensitive hashing (LSH) algorithms for document deduplication
June 2016 – Sept. 2016
Machine Learning Systems Engineering Intern
Summary: graphical named entity-linking algorithms
Kawasaki, Japan
July 2015 – Sept. 2015
Fujitsu Laboratories
R&D Intern
Summary: unsupervised relation extraction; hierarchical Bayesian text classification
Tokyo, Japan
June 2014 – August 2014
Internet Business Japan Co., Ltd.
Web Development Intern
Summary: web UI/UX for clients; creating educational web dev course materials
Cambridge, MA
Jan. 2015 – May 2016
MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Undergraduate Researcher in InfoLab Group
Summary: natural language query expansion; automatic corpus annotation; search for MOOCs
June 2013 – Jan. 2014
Undergraduate Researcher in Genesis Group
Summary: natural language generation for video
Publications & Patents
Monticello, IL
Sept. 2019
Contrastive Multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis
Abdi-Hakin Dirie, Abubakar Abid, and James Zou
- Paper link: https://proceedings.allerton.csl.illinois.edu/media/files/0189.pdf
- Presented at the 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing
- Smaller work presented at the Modeling and Decision-making in the Spatiotemporal Domain workshop (NeurIPS 2018, Montreal)
Systems and method for investigating relationships among entities
- Patent link: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20210149980A1/en
Education
Cambridge, MA
Sept. 2016 – Sept. 2017
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Master of Engineering in Computer Science & Engineering
- Thesis: Extracting Diverse Attribute-Value Information from Product Catalog Text via Transfer Learning
- GPA: 5.0/5.0
- Coursework in: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Bayesian Methods
Sept. 2012 – June 2016
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Engineering
- GPA: General – 4.4/5.0, Major – 4.5/5.0
- Coursework in: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Linguistics, Symbolic Systems, Software/Systems Engineering, Cognitive Robotics
Tech Stack
Languages: Go, Python, Julia, JavaScript (+ HTML/CSS)
Technologies: LLMs, Docker, notebooking (Jupyter/Pluto.jl), search
(Meilisearch/Elasticsearch), scripting (zsh/bash/make), Node.js,
Redis