Update: I am now a Research Staff Member at IBM Research. (The rest of this page is due for an update soon; please check back!)
I am a PhD candidate earned my PhD at the University of Michigan, where I study natural language processing (NLP) as part of the CLAIR group, supervised by Dragomir Radev.
I received my bachelor's degree from Boston College and my juris doctorate from the University of Virginia School of Law. I practiced law for several years. My favorite part of my job was trying to understand the technology involved in patent cases I litigated. My least favorite part was document review: reading thousands of documents to figure out which were relevant to a case and to pick out the few needles of useful information in a massive haystack of emails and corporate documents. When I saw IBM's Watson on Jeopardy in 2011, I could not help but be fascinated, both by the potential application of taking over the tedious parts of my job and by the apparent ability of a machine to understand language.
In 2013, I left my job as a litigator to study NLP full time. I love my job. My working life is a mixture of (1) hearing really smart people explain wonderfully clever technology, (2) working on my own research to try to push the boundaries of what technology can do, and (3) teaching undergraduates the fundamental concepts of computer science.
I am interested in semantics: What information is in this text, how can we represent it, and what can we do with that representation? Like the rest of the NLP community, I am also quite interested in how deep learning can be applied to the problems I work on.
I have been a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) for the following courses: