What degree did you receive from Illinois and when?
Graduated with a PhD in Linguistics in 2013.

What have you been doing since you graduated? What is your current title/position? How long have you worked there?
I am a Senior Analytical Linguist at Google. I have worked for Google for 7 years, following a short stint as a postdoc at the USC Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab.

What are you working on right now?
I work on a human data labeling/crowd computing platform in Google's Ads and Commerce organization. My team's job is to generate data that is used to train and evaluate automated systems. Primarily I work on: designing, executing, and delivering studies for ads & commerce engineering teams; designing tools and systems for others to use to collect human-labeled data; and developing best practices for human-labeled data collection.

How has your degree from Illinois helped you in your career?

I don't work in Linguistics research anymore, but graduate-level skills in the social sciences, like collecting and interpreting data from groups of people, are essential to my work in human data labeling.

Posted: 11/10/2020