Month: September 2011

Last week, I delivered the following presentation at the CMU Intelligence Seminar:

I had a great audience, including the department head! Of course that meant fielding tough questions, but that’s what makes it fun to present at my alma mater. Now that it’s been over a decade since my defense, I can handle the tough questions. 🙂

Unfortunately there is no video, but hopefully the slides are reasonably self-explanatory. If you have questions, please ask them in the comments.

Tonight I’m taking a red-eye to Pittsburgh so that I can spend three days at my (doctoral) alma mater, CMU. In addition to spending time with lots of great students and faculty, my goal is to communicate a taste of the hard computer science problems we are solving (or trying to solve!) at LinkedIn. I’m giving a tech talk Tuesday afternoon, joining my colleagues for an info session Tuesday evening, and participating in the Technical Opportunities Conference (TOC) Wednesday.

Here’s a teaser for my tech talk:

You can find more details about LinkedIn’s visits to CMU and other campuses at http://studentcareers.linkedin.com/.

Hopefully some of you are attending the O’Reilly Strata Conference in New York this Thursday and Friday. If so, I encourage you to attend my panel session on “Entities, Relationships, and Semantics: the State of Structured Search“:

Structured search improves the search experience through the identification of entities and their relationships in documents and queries. This panel will explore the current state of structured and semi-structured search, as well as exploring the open problems in an area that promises to revolutionize information seeking.

The four panelists work on some of the world’s largest structured search problems, from offering users structured search on Google’s web corpus to building a computing system that defeated Jeopardy! champions in an extreme test of natural language understanding. They work on the data, tools, and research that are driving this field. They are all excellent researchers and presenters, promising to offer a informative and engaging panel discussion, for which I will act as moderator.

Panelists:

• Andrew Hogue is a Senior Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager in the Search Quality group at Google New York. He has worked on a wide array of projects including question answering, Google Squared, sentiment analysis, local and product search, and Google Goggles. His is interested in the areas of structured data, information extraction, and machine learning, and their applications to search and search interfaces. Prior to Google, he earned a M.Eng. and B.S. in Computer Science from MIT.

• Breck Baldwin is the President of Alias-i, creators of the popular LingPipe computational linguistics toolkit. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1995 from the University of Pennsylvania. In the time between his thesis on coreference resolution and evaluation and founding Alias-i in 1999, Breck worked on DARPA-funded projects through the University of Pennsylvania.

• Evan Sandhaus works as the Semantic Technologist in The New York Times Research and Development Labs. He is spearheading The New York Times Linked Open Data Strategy and overseeing the release of 1.8 million documents to the computer science research community. Previously, Evan helped to put The New York Times on Google Earth, collaborated with New York University to explore new directions in News Search, and worked to bring The New York Times to Facebook.

• Wlodek Zadrozny is an IBM Researcher working on natural language applications. Most recently he worked on text sources for Watson (IBM’s Jeopardy chamption) and applying related DeepQA technology to business problems. His previous work ranged from language processing research to product development and technical planning; in particular, he lead the development of interactions systems that used speech, natural language and focused search. Wlodek Zadrozny received a Ph.D. in Mathematics, from the Polish Academy of Science.

And one more thing. Karaoke at Second on Second in the East Village on Friday night. It’s an unofficial Strata after-party, so come join us Big Data folks for some Big Fun.

I grew up in New York City. On September 11th, 2001, I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, desperately trying to get through to my parents by all means of communication at my disposal. My dad worked at 40 Worth Street, only a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. Thankfully none of my family or friends were harmed that day, but that fateful event ten years ago left a mark on the world that no one of my generation will ever forget.

Fortunately I have happier associations with this anniversary.

On September 11th, 1999, I boarded an Amtrak from New York to Boston to join Steve Papa, Pete Bell, Dave Gourley, Fritz Knabe, Jack Walter, and Phil Braden to start the company that would eventually be named Endeca. I had no way of knowing whether we would persuade VCs to fund us beyond our six months of seed investment, let alone that we would develop a technology that to revolutionize the search experience of millions of users around the world. Our modest ambition was to build a better way to find stuff on eBay. That goal remains unfulfilled, but 44 of the top 100 online retailers use Endeca, which isn’t too shabby. Especially considering that Endeca has expanded well beyond online retail into domains like manufacturing, business intelligence, and government.

On Seprtember 11th, 2002, I gathered the Endeca founding team for a dinner to celebrate the company’s 3rd birthday. Given my reputation for general irreverence, I feared that my colleagues would think this was a stunt to mock the memory of the more familiar 9/11. But it was quite the opposite. September 11th, 1999 was a turning point in my professional life, and no terrorist was going to take that happiness away from me. To this day I am grateful that my colleagues recognized my sincerity and joined me in this celebration.

The dinner that night was an emotional one: 2002 had been a tough year for the software industry — one in which we saw many of our peer companies fold. Fortunately it was the beginning of much better times for us: from 2003 to 2006, Endeca was the fastest growing private company in Massachusetts. No IPO yet, but the rumors are encouraging.

I left Endeca almost two years ago, going to Google and then LinkedIn. But I will always have fond memories of the decade I spent at Endeca — an experience that established much of the passion that drives me today. I am very proud to have been part of the founding team of such a great company, even if now I can only follow from a distance.

Happy birthday, Endeca, and many more to come!

As many of you know, I’m a proud alumnus of the CMU School of Computer Science (yes, I also attended the CMU of Massachusetts). I’m delighted to have the opportunity to spend a few days on campus this month, and I hope that I’ll have a chance to meet with lots of students and faculty while I’m there.

Specifically, I’ll be giving a talk at Eugene Fink’s Intelligence Seminar on Tuesday, September 20th at 3:30pm in Gates-Hillman 4303:

Keeping It Professional: Relevance, Recommendations, and Reputation at LinkedIn

LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 120 million members in over 200 countries. In order to connect its users to the people, opportunities, and content that best advance their careers, LinkedIn has developed a variety of algorithms that surface relevant content, offer personalized recommendations, and establish topic-sensitive reputation — all at a massive scale. In this talk, I will discuss some of the most challenging technical problems we face at LinkedIn, and the approaches we are taking to address them.

I hope to see all of you there! My colleagues and I will also be hosting an information session that same Tuesday at 6pm in Porter Hall, Room 125B, as well as participating in the Technical Opportunities Conference Tuesday and Wednesday. And of course LinkedIn will be conducting on-campus interviews: those will take place all day on Thursday, September 22nd.

If you are a CMU student interested in opportunities at LinkedIn, please apply through TartanTrak (yes, I wish you could just apply with LinkedIn — we’ll get there!). Of course, feel free to reach out to me personally at dtunkelang@linkedin.com. We already have more applicants than slots, but I promise that every application will be considered. I’m very excited to recruit CMU students to strengthen our growing team of software engineers and data scientists.

See you soon, and let’s go Tartans!