Talks, papers, and press
I started in journalism, ended up in engineering, and spent 15 years bouncing between the two worlds. Along the way: conferences in Singapore and Silicon Valley, peer-reviewed research, and tools that journalists and academics use in 50+ countries. Here's the highlight reel.
Published research
ICWSM 2021 (AAAI)
Large-scale media analysis with Media Cloud
Peer-reviewed paper presented at the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Covered the architecture and methodology behind processing millions of news articles across 20+ languages for media research.
600+ scholarly citations across the Media Cloud body of work
Conference talks
PGConf Asia — Singapore
PostgreSQL at scale for media analysis
How we used PostgreSQL to store and query billions of rows of news data. Partitioning strategies, query optimization, and the tradeoffs of running analytics on a transactional database.
PostgresConf — Silicon Valley
Distributed data pipelines with PostgreSQL
Building distributed NLP pipelines that process news articles from 50+ countries. The talk covered our migration from a Perl monolith to a distributed Python system and the PostgreSQL patterns that made it work.
Media & citations
The New York Times
Media Cloud research cited in reporting on media ecosystems and information flow. The platform I helped build became a standard tool for journalists investigating news patterns.
Scholarly citations
Research papers, dissertations, and policy documents across political science, communications, and computer science. Media Cloud is used by researchers at universities in 50+ countries.
Research funding
The Media Cloud project secured over $30 million in grants from the Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, and other major research funders during my tenure.
Open source
Most of the code I've written in my career is open source. Media Cloud's codebase is public. So is the infrastructure behind the NLP pipelines, the crawler, and the analysis tools. I believe the best way to build trust is to let people see your work.
That same philosophy applies to how I approach AI deployments at Lobster Pack. Open-source tools, transparent configurations, no black boxes.
Want to work with someone who gets both the tech and the people?
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