2005-2008 University of California Berkeley
BA in Cognitive Science, concentration in computational modeling
(Highest Honors, Departmental Citation, 3.8 GPA)
Experience
January 2011 - Present Etsy.com Software Engineer in Search
TODO : list project details
July 2008 - December 2010 A9.com (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon) Software Development Engineer in Search Analytics
Agglomerative clustering to find sets of similar queries and products based on user behavior data
Generative models of user click behavior (and approximate Bayesian inference) to compensate for ‘position-bias’ in ordered search results
Distributed system for orchestrating complex analytics work-flows
Large scale ongoing analytics of search related user behavior using Hadoop
Methods and tools to evaluate quality of spelling suggestions via Mechanical Turk
Metrics to gauge proportion of Amazon’s traffic, clicks, product views, purchases, and purchase dollar attributable to search
Finding, summarizing and reporting sequences of user actions which strongly suggest that the user is having a poor search experience
Summer 2007 Twistage Intern
Framework for browser-based testingof web-apps (based on Selenium), which was subsequently adopted for use before all deploys
Search features (indexing, querying, snippets and highlighting) for a large repository of video content, based on Solr/Lucene
Research
Beppu, A., Griffiths, T. L. (2009). Iterated learning and the cultural ratchet. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
The above describes cases when a sequence of communicating Bayesian agents will have the same asymptotic consistency as a single learner, and when they will not. The predictions of our model are validated using a lab-based learning experiment with human participants.