About

I like solving applied machine learning problems, especially those that deal with design, creativity, natural language processing or interactive intelligence. I've had fun doing so in academia, large companies and startups since 2004.

Applying machine learning to design at Canva

Current work at Canva

I'm using machine learning to help users create designs more quickly and easily. Here's my YOW! Data 2021 talk on how we used machine learning to support creative exploration of our template library by bringing users' text with them as they try out new templates.

Co-organising the 1st and 2nd workshops on Gender Bias for NLP

Supported by Canva

I'm proud to be co-organising an academic workshop and shared task that help focus on making NLP tools fairer.

Automating compliance at RedMarker

Work at RedMarker

I helped build tools to change how the financial industry stays compliant with regulation. We focussed on applied machine learning and natural language processing that scales and lives in containers or serverless environments.

Sydney NLP Meetup

Natural language processing meetup in Sydney

Ben, Adam, Alex and I started this meetup in 2015 on a hunch that there was a community with interesting things to talk about. During my time there, we grew to over 800 people and organised over 20 events, including three mini-conferences for academia and industry.

Forecasting psychological distress from childhood essays

Submission to the CLPsych workshop 2018 shared task

Kylie, Louise, Ruth, Kim, Scott, Ben, and I submitted a system that tries to predict adult psychological distress from childhood essays. It's really hard!

Active Learning ... and Beyond! 🚀

Tutorial at ALTA17

Ben, Bo and I prepared a tutorial on using active learning to bootstrap simple NLP systems, including a live shared task.

Playing around with fastText to classify reddit submissions

Tutorial at the Sydney NLP meetup

This is a quick and dirty tutorial trying out fastText on some toy reddit text classification. See also bonus round on hacking continuous features into fastText.

Collective intelligence for web person search

Work at Hugo.ai (a.k.a. Abbrevi8)

Helped build a cool person research app backed by human and machine collective intelligence with Ben, Bo, Sze Kai and Andy.

Generating short biographies from database records using neural networks.

Work at Hugo.ai (a.k.a. Abbrevi8)

I co-supervised Andy building a system to generate biographical sentences from database records (i.e. Wikidata to Wikipedia) using neural sequence-to-sequence models.

Analysing post-editing of biography text

Work at Hugo.ai (a.k.a. Abbrevi8)

I worked with the rest of the Hugo team to analyse how content-experts corrected automatically-generated biography text for our users.

Analysing translation into emoji with EmojiDick

Work at Hugo.ai (a.k.a. Abbrevi8)

I analyzed the translations created in EmojiDick, a project to translate Moby Dick into emoji 🐳.

Triaging mental health forum posts

Work at Hugo.ai (a.k.a. Abbrevi8)

Ben, Glen and I submitted a system to the CLPsych shared task to triage posts on the Reach Out mental health forum.

Discovering knowledge bases on the web

Work at Hugo.ai (a.k.a. Abbrevi8)

I co-supervised Andy on work trying to identify website URLs that act as endpoints for an ad-hoc knowledge base.

Evaluating entity timelines

Work at Hugo.ai (a.k.a. Abbrevi8)

I co-supervised Xavier H. on a project evaluating how entity timelines -- lists of stories about an entity -- are built.

High quality named entity recognition with knowledge bases

Work at Xerox Research Centre Europe, now Naver Labs Europe.

Jamie, Xavier C. and I worked on some interactive information extraction, investigating the question: if a user could correct the first few sentences of a document, how well could a system tag the rest?

Natural language understanding for chatbots

Work at Xerox Research Centre Europe, now Naver Labs Europe.

I worked on a large team on chatbots for customer care, specialising in natural language understanding in the mobile telecoms domain -- what is the user's intent, what entities and problems are they talking about?

Tracking dialogue state

Work at Xerox Research Centre Europe, now Naver Labs Europe.

Julien and I worked on a submission to the 4th Dialogue State Tracking Challenge that attempted to keep up with a conversation between a travel guide and their customer.

Mining gender from IMDb castlists

Work at Xerox Research Centre Europe, now Naver Labs Europe.

Matthias and I mined IMDb for insights into how film and television gender representation has changed over time. It got picked up by The New York Times.

Teasing apart similar languages from Tweets using social data

Work at Xerox Research Centre Europe, now Naver Labs Europe.

Matthias and I used social data to identify the language a tweet is written in.

Named Entity Linking for media

PhD project with Sydney Uni, the CMCRC and Fairfax Media

My thesis (supervised by James and Ben) was on how to link named entity mentions to knowledge bases -- or which Wikipedia article should we link "John Smith" to in a news story? We worked with Fairfax to commercialise this into zoom, a product that lets users browse news by entity rather than story. We also participated in the TAC shared task from 2010 to 2013.

Tracking the flow of financial news

PhD project with Sydney Uni, the CMCRC.

This project was to try and identify how ASX company announcements were reported in the Reuters news service, categorising whether they reported facts, general background or new analysis.

Demographic and psychometric profiling email authors using the messages they write

Work at Appen.

I worked on a team collecting data and building a system to predict an email author's age, education, gender and big-five psychometric attributes from the text they had written.

Reviewing

Work for the academic community

Teaching

Work at Sydney Uni

I tutored INFO1903 Infomatics (Advanced) (lots of python in 2010, 2011, 2012) and COMP5338 Advanced Data Models (2010, 2011). I received a 2012 Dean's Award for Excellence in Tutoring (School). I have delivered a couple of guest lectures for software engineering and NLP courses.